e his mind was
soon a blank, and when a servant pointed out a heap of skins in a
corner, he flung himself on them and was at once asleep. He was utterly
at their mercy, but his course, had he known it, was the wisest. Even a
Bada's treachery has its limits, and he will not knife a confident
guest. The men talked and wrangled, ate and drank, and finally snored
around him, but he slept through it all like a sleeper of Ephesus.

When he woke the hut was cleared. The village slept late but he had
slept later, for the sun was piercing the unglazed windows and making
pattern-work on the earth floor. He had slept soundly a sleep haunted
with nightmares, and he was still dazed as he peered out into the square
where men were passing. He saw a sentry at the door of his hut, which
reminded him of his condition. All the long night he had been far away,
fishing, it seemed to him, in a curious place which was Glenavelin, and
yet was ever changing to a stranger glen. It was moonlight, still,
bright and warm on all the green hill shoulders. He remembered that he
caught nothing, but had been deliriously happy. People seemed passing
on the bank, Arthur and Wratislaw and Julia Heston, and all his
boyhood's companions. He talked to them pleasantly, and all the while
he was moving up the glen which lay so soft in the moonlight. He
remembered looking everywhere for Alice Wishart, but her face was
wanting. Then suddenly the place seemed to change. The sleeping glen
changed to a black sword-cut among rocks, his friends disappeared, and
only George was left. He remembered that George cried out something and
pointed to the gorge, and he knew--though how he knew it he could not
tell--that the lost Alice was somewhere there before him in the darkness
and he must go towards her. Then he had wakened shivering, for in that
darkness there was terror as well as joy.

He went to the door, only to find himself turned back by the sheep-skin
sentry, who half unsheathed for his benefit an ugly knife. He found
that his revolver, his sole weapon, had been taken while he slept.
Escape was impossible till his captors should return.

A day of burning sun had followed on the storm. Out of doors in the
scorching glare from the rock there seemed an extraordinary bustle. It
was like the preparations for a march, save that there seemed no method
in the activity. One man burnished a knife, a dozen were cleaning
rifles, and all wore the evil-smelling finery with whic