arth that day; the beauty of
everything in that intense blue haze was wonderful.

The top of the combe was very steep, steeper than any of the ascent,
because it had been built up like an outer wall by the savages who once
lived there with their cattle. I could see just the bare steep wall
of the rampart standing up in a dull green line of short-grassed turf
against the sky, now burning with the intense blue of summer. One hard
quick scramble, with my fingernails dug into the ground, brought my head
to the top of the rampart, beyond which I could see nothing but
great ferns, a forest of great ferns, already four or five feet high,
stretching away below, into the cup of the camp or citadel. I did not
dare to stand up, lest I should be seen. I burrowed my way among the
ferns over the wall into the hollow, worming my way towards the edge of
the fern clump so that I could see. In a minute, I was gazing through
the fern-stems into the camp itself; it was a curious sight.

About fifty people (some of them women) were sitting about a hollow
in the ground, which I guessed to be a sort of smokeless fireplace or
earth-oven. Everywhere else, all over the hollow of the camp, which
must have been a full three hundred yards across, were various kinds of
farm-stock, mostly cattle, though there were many picketed horses, too.
At first I thought that I had climbed into a camp of gipsies, which gave
me a scare; for gipsies then were a wild lot, whom wise folk avoided.
Then, as I glanced about, I saw a sentry standing not thirty yards from
me, but well above me, on the rampart top. He was no gipsy he was an
ordinary farmer's lad, with the walk of a ploughman. His sleeves, which
were rolled back, showed me a sun-burnt pair of arms, such as no gipsy
ever had. What puzzled me about him was his heavy double-barrelled
pistol, which he carried in his right hand, with something of a military
cock, yet as though awed by it. He was not over sure of that same
pistol. I could see that he confounded it in some way with art-magic.

Then I remembered what the old soldier had said the night before about
club men. This camp must be a camp of club men, I thought. They had come
there to protect their stock from the rapine of our vile pillagers, who
had spread such terror amongst the farmers the day before. Perched up
on the combe, with sentries always on the look-out, they could see the
Duke's raiders long before they came within gunshot. If an armed forc