those faces, making ribboned scores to the bottom.
There had been constant falls of earth from above, and here and there a
large tree had been thrown over the abyss, and, in that position,
holding on by its roots, had taken a new lease of life.

Thanks then to Nature, working for long years, the twin, or rather the
divorced hill-cheeks which, at their separation, were raw earth, now
had a covering of undergrowth and overgrowth. It would be dead in the
winter when the sap is down, budding in the spring when the sap rises,
green in the summer when it has run into leafage, brown in the autumn
when the storage roots begin to call their own back again.

A sort of rough road, worn by usage, as a short-cut for the folk of the
region, ran on the level between the halves of the Pass. Big rocks
fallen from above lay around, and I confusedly sat down beside one of
these. It broke the snellish wind which had begun to blow with the
first dawn, as it often does in those parts, a blast to the parting
night and the coming day.

Presently a shot was fired from one end of the Pass and I could make no
mistake as to the weapon used. It was the military flintlock, a clumsy
gun, better suited to scare crows than shoot straight, but it was the
best we had.

A warning, a signal for some purpose, I judged, because it was followed
by what I can only describe as a waiting silence. You had the echoes
of the shot scattering up the heights of the Pass, and then a tense
feeling in the atmosphere, as if a hundred men expected an answer. It
came, in another straggling shot, from the other end of the Pass.

Next there was solid evidence that what I heard had been a pre-arranged
signal, to which a plan of campaign attached. At each end of the Pass
I saw the red-coats multiply until they formed faint bunches of colour.
Who, I wonder, first clothed the soldier man in scarlet, for an easier
target he could not offer, even to an ill-shooting flint-lock. Scarlet
and the pageantry of courts, scarlet and the capturing of women's
hearts, but for the soldier himself, when he gets down to his trade, it
is scarlet and death.

As I waited intently and looked, I could almost count, up on the brows
of the Pass, how many red-coats the sentinels of our first alarm had
grown into. They made dots, moving against the skyline, and, as I next
made out, they were in concert with other knots of scarlet, active at
the end of the Pass below. I did not need to be