yet.'

I tried to think, to reason it out; to consider where the hut should be;
while the wind sighed through the oaks, and here and there I could hear
an acorn fall. But the thing pressed too close on me; my thoughts would
not be hurried, and at last I said at a venture,--

'Up the hill. Straight up from the stack.'

He did not demur, and we plunged at the ascent, knee-deep in bracken and
furze, sweating at every pore with our exertions, and hearing the troop
come every moment nearer on the road below. Doubtless they knew exactly
whither to go! Forced to stop and take breath when we had scrambled up
fifty yards or so, I saw their lanthorns shining like moving glow-worms;
I could even hear the clink of steel. For all I could tell, the hut
might be down there, and we be moving from it. But it was too late to go
back now--they were close to the fern-stack; and in despair I turned
to the hill again. A dozen steps and I stumbled. I rose and plunged on
again; again stumbled. Then I found that I was treading level earth.
And--was it water I saw before me, below me? or some mirage of the sky?

Neither; and I gripped my fellow's arm, as he came abreast of me, and
stopped him sharply. Below us in the middle of a steep hollow, a pit in
the hill-side, a light shone out through some aperture and quivered on
the mist, like the pale lamp of a moorland hobgoblin. It made itself
visible, displaying nothing else; a wisp of light in the bottom of a
black bowl. Yet my spirits rose with a great bound at sight of it; for I
knew that I had stumbled on the place I sought.

In the common run of things I should have weighed my next step
carefully, and gone about it slowly. But here was no place for thought,
nor room for delay; and I slid down the side of the hollow on the
instant, and the moment my feet touched the bottom sprang to the door of
the little hut, whence the light issued. A stone turned under my feet
in my rush, and I fell on my knees on the threshold; but the fall only
brought my face to a level with the face of the man who lay inside on
a bed of fern. He had been reading. Startled by the sound I made, he
dropped his book, and in a flash stretched out his hand for a weapon.
But the muzzle of my pistol covered him, he was not in a posture from
which he could spring, and at a sharp word from me he dropped his hand;
the tigerish glare which flickered for an instant in his eyes gave place
to a languid smile, and he shrugged his sho