ped the professor's arm which he had seized, sprang away
into the darkness ahead, and then there was utter silence.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR.

RECEIVING THE ENEMY.

Lawrence kept the watch in the ravine by which they had reached the
spring that day, and as he posted himself a little way up the slope,
where he could shelter himself behind a block of stone and gaze for some
distance along the deep rift among the rocks, he could not help feeling
somewhat elated by his position.

He was stiff and sore with his long ride, but the refreshment of which
he had partaken and the pleasant coolness of the evening air raised his
spirits, and he smiled to himself as he felt that his strength was
returning, and that he was drinking in health with every breath of the
pure air around.

There was something so important, too, in his position on sentry there,
with a loaded gun resting upon the rock, the gun he took such pains to
polish and keep free from every spot of rust. Only a short time since
he was lying back in his easy-chair in Guilford Street, waited upon
incessantly by Mrs Dunn, while now he was a traveller passing through
adventures which startled him sometimes, and at others thrilled him by
their strangeness and peril.

"It is like reading a book," he said to himself as he stood there
watching the side of the ridge high up, with its rugged masses of stone,
and a feathery cypress here and there turned to orange and gold by the
setting sun.

Then he went over again the skirmish of the past night, and how the
robbers had been beaten off. Next he began to wonder whether the band
would stop at the end of the ravine long, and soon after, having
surfeited himself with gazing at the fading light in the sky and the
blackening rocks that had so lately been glistening as if of gold, he
began to yawn and think that he should much like to lie down and sleep
off this weariness which seemed to be coming over him like a mist.

He leaned more and more upon the stone, so as to stare down the ravine,
which kept growing darker and darker, till the bushes and tall feathery
cypresses began to assume suspicious forms and seem to be tall watchers
or crouching men coming slowly forward to the attack.

A dozen times over he felt sure that he was right, and that he ought to
fire or run back and give the alarm. But a dread of being laughed at
checked him; and then he seemed to see more clearly and to make out that
these were not men, but aft