Then, when my big mental guns had over-
turned all opposition, and were growling almost
inaudibly away on the horizon of pure speculation,
the routed enemy straggled in upon their rear,
massed silently into a solid phalanx, and captured
me, bag and baggage. An indefinable dread came
upon me. I rose to shake it off, and began threading
the narrow dell by an old, grass-grown cow-path that
seemed to flow along the bottom, as a substitute for
the brook that Nature had neglected to provide.
The trees among which the path straggled were
ordinary, well-behaved plants, a trifle perverted as
to trunk and eccentric as to bough, but with noth-
ing unearthly in their general aspect. A few loose
boulders, which had detached themselves from the
sides of the depression to set up an independent
existence at the bottom, had dammed up the path-
way, here and there, but their stony repose had noth-
ing in it of the stillness of death. There was a kind
of death-chamber hush in the valley, it is true, and a
mysterious whisper above: the wind was just finger-
ing the tops of the trees--that was all.
I had not thought of connecting Jo. Dunfer's
drunken narrative with what I now sought, and only
when I came into a clear space and stumbled over
the level trunks of some small trees did I have the
revelation. This was the site of the abandoned
'shack.' The discovery was verified by noting that
some of the rotting stumps were hacked all round,
in a most unwoodmanlike way, while others were
cut straight across, and the butt ends of the cor-
responding trunks had the blunt wedge-form given
by the axe of a master.
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