was too cold for comfort in their draughty dining-room, and they were
not invited to enter the inhospitable gates. In half an hour they were
wending their way down the north side of the peak by gradually declining
roads, headed for the much-talked-of home of the Witch in Ganlook Gap,
some six miles from Edelweiss as the crow flies, but twice that distance
over the tortuous bridle paths and post roads.

It was three o'clock when they clattered down the stone road and up to
the forbidding vale in which lurked, like an evil, guilty thing, the
log-built home of that ancient female who made no secret of her
practices in witchcraft. The hut stood back from the mountain road a
hundred yards or more, at the head of a small, thicket-grown recess.

A low, thatched roof protruded from the hill against which the hut was
built. As a matter of fact, a thin chimney grew out of the earth
itself, for all the world like a smoking tree stump. The hovel was a
squalid, beggary thing that might have been built over night somewhere
back in the dark ages. Its single door was so low that one was obliged
to stoop to enter the little room where the dame had been holding forth
for three-score years, 'twas said. This was her throne-room, her
dining-room, her bed-chamber, her all, it would seem, unless one had
been there before and knew that her kitchen was beyond, in the side of
the hill. The one window, sans glass, looked narrowly out upon an odd
opening in the foliage below, giving the occupant of the hut an
unobstructed view of the winding road that led up from Edelweiss. The
door faced the Monastery road down which the two men had just ridden. As
for the door yard, it was no more than a pebbly, avalanche-swept opening
among the trees and rocks, down which in the glacial age perhaps a
thousand torrents had leaped, but which was now so dry and white and
lifeless that one could only think of bones bleached and polished by a
sun that had sickened of the work a thousand years ago.

This brief, inadequate description of the Witch's hut is given in
advance of the actual descent of the personally conducted gentleman for
the somewhat ambiguous reason that he was to find it not at all as
described.

The two horsemen rode into the glen and came plump upon a small
detachment of the royal guard, mounted and rather resolute in their lack
of amiability.

"Wot's this?" gasped Mr. Hobbs, drawing rein at the edge of the pebbly
dooryard.

"Soldiers, I'd sa