r it was a gleamy day--it brought out no
colours, only degrees of shade. No mountains I had ever seen--not the
Drakensberg or the red kopjes of Damaraland or the cold, white peaks
around Erzerum--ever looked so unearthly and uncanny.

Oddly enough, too, the sight of them set me thinking about Ivery. There
seemed no link between a smooth, sedentary being, dwelling in villas
and lecture-rooms, and that shaggy tangle of precipices. But I felt
there was, for I had begun to realize the bigness of my opponent.
Blenkiron had said that he spun his web wide. That was intelligible
enough among the half-baked youth of Biggleswick, and the pacifist
societies, or even the toughs on the Clyde. I could fit him in all
right to that picture. But that he should be playing his game among
those mysterious black crags seemed to make him bigger and more
desperate, altogether a different kind of proposition. I didn't exactly
dislike the idea, for my objection to my past weeks had been that I was
out of my proper job, and this was more my line of country. I always
felt that I was a better bandit than a detective. But a sort of awe
mingled with my satisfaction. I began to feel about Ivery as I had felt
about the three devils of the Black Stone who had hunted me before the
war, and as I never felt about any other Hun. The men we fought at the
Front and the men I had run across in the Greenmantle business, even
old Stumm himself, had been human miscreants. They were formidable
enough, but you could gauge and calculate their capacities. But this
Ivery was like a poison gas that hung in the air and got into
unexpected crannies and that you couldn't fight in an upstanding way.
Till then, in spite of Blenkiron's solemnity, I had regarded him simply
as a problem. But now he seemed an intimate and omnipresent enemy,
intangible, too, as the horror of a haunted house. Up on that sunny
hillside, with the sea winds round me and the whaups calling, I got a
chill in my spine when I thought of him.

I am ashamed to confess it, but I was also horribly hungry. There was
something about the war that made me ravenous, and the less chance of
food the worse I felt. If I had been in London with twenty restaurants
open to me, I should as likely as not have gone off my feed. That was
the cussedness of my stomach. I had still a little chocolate left, and
I ate the fisherman's buttered scones for luncheon, but long before the
evening my thoughts were dwelling on my emp