eh, Ronny?"
And again we started to run, zigzagging to the dark bits till we
crossed the first rise, and we stood looking back. The whins were all
ablaze and the trees in the belting standing out clear, and the little
figures still running with the torches.

[1] Steep.

[2] Opening.

CHAPTER XII.

McALLAN'S LOCKER.

Over the first rise of the hills was a long dreary waste--treeless,
awesome, desolate. Whiles, as we ran, a curlew would rise, and its
long whirling cry rose in the night, filling the ears and leaving an
emptiness afterwards in the silence, for things not canny to be
filling. Once we startled a herd of red-deer feeding round the mossy
lips of a frozen pool, and away they galloped. One lordly stag wheeled
with antlers high, gazed at our flight, and vanished, leaving us in
that dreadful stillness, and a cold eerie wind whined and sighed over
us. We spoke little, having no breath to spare, for the ground was
growing more steep and broken towards the second rise, up which we
clambered, sliding and falling, grasping frozen heather till we reached
the top. The hill was now a riddle of peat hags and binks, like a
bee's skep, a place of treachery and slimy death, although the frost
would have most of the sinking pools in its iron hand; but we never
stopped the long stride that seemed so slow to me at first. Dan bent
and twisted through the peat banks like a hound on the trail. Here was
a place where folk had wrought, cutting their fuel for generations; and
God knows what memories were lurking here from the old days, what
ghosts of love and hatred, what spirits of tears and laughter. Would
the race never end? My tongue, dry and swollen, stuck raspily against
the roof of my mouth. Round my lips was a hot fire, for I had grasped
a handful of snow and melted it in my mouth as I ran. We were past the
peat hags, and the ground fell away under our feet; the heather got
scantier and sprits more common, until we had descended, maybe, five
hundred feet into a wide valley with a level plain at its heart, with
many clumps of stunted birches and hardy firs. Here was the great
grazing for young beasts in the summer, away here in the glen, but now
only stillness and desolation. A wide burn rumbled and splashed on its
gravelly banks in front of us, and we could hear the deep noise of a
waterfall.

"Hold in to the fall," cried McKinnon, and his voice was hoarse as a
raven's.

"I ken this like the ba