r later, he, Gilling, Vickers and Spurge sped along the
desolate, wind-swept moorland on their way to the Reaver's Glen. It was
a typically North Country autumnal morning, cold, raw, rainy; the tops of
the neighbouring hills were capped with dark clouds; sea-birds called
dismally across the heather; the sea, seen in glimpses through vistas of
fir and pine, looked angry and threatening.

"A fit morning for a do of this sort!" exclaimed Gilling suddenly. "Is it
pretty bare and bleak at this tower of yours, Spurge?"

"You'll be warm enough, guv'nor, where I shall put you," answered Spurge.
"One as has knocked about these woods and moors as much as I've had to
knows as many places to hide his nose in as a fox does! I'll put you by
that tower where you'll be snug enough, and warm enough, too--and where
nobody'll see you neither. And here's High Nick and out we get."

Leaving the car in a deep cutting of the hills and instructing the driver
to await the return of one or other of them at a wayside farmstead a mile
back, the three adventurers followed Spurge into the wood which led to
the top of the Beaver's Glen. The poacher guided them onward by narrow
and winding tracks through the undergrowth for a good half-mile; then he
led them through thickets in which there was no paths at all; finally,
after a gradual and cautious advance behind a high hedge of dense
evergreen, he halted them at a corner of the wood and motioned them to
look out through a loosely-laced network of branches.

"Here we are!" he whispered. "Tower--Reaver's Glen--sea in the distance.
Lone spot, ain't it, gentlemen?"

Copplestone and Gilling, who had never seen this part of the coast
before, looked out on the scene with lively interest. It was certainly a
prospect of romance and of wild, almost savage beauty on which they
gazed. Immediately in front of them, at a distance of twenty to thirty
yards, stood the old peel tower, a solid square mass of grey stone,
intact as to its base and its middle stories, ruinous and crumbling from
thence to what was left of its battlements and the turret tower at one
angle. The fallen stone lay in irregular heaps on the ground at its foot;
all around it were clumps of furze and bramble. From the level plateau on
which it stood the Glen fell away in horseshoe formation gradually
narrowing and descending until it terminated in a thick covert of fir and
pine that ran down to the land end of the cove of which Spurge had told