, only with his girths well up,
to turn away and flee at speed, if anything should happen. And now
he proved how well it is to be wary and wide-awake, even in lonesome
places. For at the other side of the Slough, and a few land-yards beyond
it, where the ground was less noisome, he had observed a felled tree
lying over a great hole in the earth, with staves of wood, and slabs of
stone, and some yellow gravel around it. But the flags of reeds around
the morass partly screened it from his eyes, and he could not make
out the meaning of it, except that it meant no good, and probably was
witchcraft. Yet Dolly seemed not to be harmed by it, for there she was
as large as life, tied to a stump not far beyond, and flipping the flies
away with her tail.

While John was trembling within himself, lest Dolly should get scent of
his pony, and neigh and reveal their presence, although she could not
see them, suddenly to his great amazement something white arose out of
the hole, under the brown trunk of the tree. Seeing this his blood went
back within him, yet he was not able to turn and flee, but rooted his
face in among the loose stones, and kept his quivering shoulders back,
and prayed to God to protect him. However, the white thing itself was
not so very awful, being nothing more than a long-coned night-cap with a
tassel on the top, such as criminals wear at hanging-time. But when John
saw a man's face under it, and a man's neck and shoulders slowly rising
out of the pit, he could not doubt that this was the place where the
murderers come to life again, according to the Exmoor story. He knew
that a man had been hanged last week, and that this was the ninth day
after it.

Therefore he could bear no more, thoroughly brave as he had been,
neither did he wait to see what became of the gallows-man; but climbed
on his horse with what speed he might, and rode away at full gallop.
Neither did he dare go back by the way he came, fearing to face Black
Barrow Down! therefore he struck up the other track leading away towards
Cloven Rocks, and after riding hard for an hour and drinking all
his whisky, he luckily fell in with a shepherd, who led him on to a
public-house somewhere near Exeford. And here he was so unmanned, the
excitement being over, that nothing less than a gallon of ale and half
a gammon of bacon, brought him to his right mind again. And he took good
care to be home before dark, having followed a well-known sheep track.

When