officer's arm. The grip of his little hand was astonishing.
"Senor! Bernardino had taken notice of him. What more do you

want? And listen - men have disappeared on this road - on a
certain portion of this road, when Bernardino kept a MESON, an inn,

and I, his brother-in-law, had coaches and mules for hire. Now
there are no travellers, no coaches. The French have ruined me.

Bernardino has retired here for reasons of his own after my sister
died. They were three to torment the life out of her, he and

Erminia and Lucilla, two aunts of his - all affiliated to the
devil. And now he has robbed me of my last mule. You are an armed

man. Demand the MACHO from him, with a pistol to his head, senor -
it is not his, I tell you - and ride after your man who is so

precious to you. And then you shall both be safe, for no two
travellers have been ever known to disappear together in those

days. As to the beast, I, its owner, I confide it to your honour."
They were staring hard at each other, and Byrne nearly burst into a

laugh at the ingenuity and transparency of the little man's plot to
regain possession of his mule. But he had no difficulty to keep a

straight face because he felt deep within himself a strange
inclination to do that very extraordinary thing. He did not laugh,

but his lip quivered; at which the diminutive Spaniard, detaching
his black glittering eyes from Byrne's face, turned his back on him

brusquely with a gesture and a fling of the cloak which somehow
expressed contempt, bitterness, and discouragement all at once. He

turned away and stood still, his hat aslant, muffled up to the
ears. But he was not offended to the point of refusing the silver

DURO which Byrne offered him with a non-committal speech as if
nothing extraordinary had passed between them.

"I must make haste on board now," said Byrne, then.
"VAYA USTED CON DIOS," muttered the gnome. And this interview

ended with a sarcastic low sweep of the hat which was replaced at
the same perilous angle as before.

Directly the boat had been hoisted the ship's sails were filled on
the off-shore tack, and Byrne imparted the whole story to his

captain, who was but a very few years older than himself. There
was some amused indignation at it - but while they laughed they

looked gravely at each other. A Spanish dwarf trying to beguile an
officer of his majesty's navy into stealing a mule for him - that

was too funny, too ridiculous, too incredible. Those were the
exclamations of the captain. He couldn't get over the

grotesqueness of it.
"Incredible. That's just it," murmured Byrne at last in a

significant tone.
They exchanged a long stare. "It's as clear as daylight," affirmed

the captain impatiently, because in his heart he was not certain.
And Tom the best seaman in the ship for one, the good-humouredly

deferential friend of his boyhood for the other, was becoming
endowed with a compelling fascination, like a symbolic figure of

loyalty appealing to their feelings and their conscience, so that
they could not detach their thoughts from his safety. Several

times they went up on deck, only to look at the coast, as if it
could tell them something of his fate. It stretched away,

lengthening in the distance, mute, naked, and savage, veiled now
and then by the slanting cold shafts of rain. The westerly swell

rolled its interminable angry lines of foam and big dark clouds
flew over the ship in a sinister procession.

"I wish to goodness you had done what your little friend in the
yellow hat wanted you to do," said the commander of the sloop late

in the afternoon with visible exasperation.
"Do you, sir?" answered Byrne, bitter with positiveanguish. "I

wonder what you would have said afterwards? Why! I might have
been kicked out of the service for looting a mule from a nation in

alliance with His Majesty. Or I might have been battered to a pulp
with flails and pitch-forks - a pretty tale to get abroad about one

of your officers - while trying to steal a mule. Or chased
ignominiously to the boat - for you would not have expected me to

shoot down unoffending people for the sake of a mangy mule. . . And
yet," he added in a low voice, "I almost wish myself I had done

it."
Before dark those two young men had worked themselves up into a

highly complexpsychological state of scornful scepticism and
alarmed credulity. It tormented them exceedingly; and the thought

that it would have to last for six days at least, and possibly be
prolonged further for an definite" target="_blank" title="a.模糊的；无限期的">indefinite time, was not to be borne. The

ship was therefore put on the inshore tack at dark. All through
the gusty dark night she went towards the land to look for her man,

at times lying over in the heavy puffs, at others rolling idle in
the swell, nearly stationary, as if she too had a mind of her own

to swing perplexed between cool reason and warm impulse.
Then just at daybreak a boat put off from her and went on tossed by

the seas towards the shallow cove where, with considerable
difficulty, an officer in a thick coat and a round hat managed to

land on a strip of shingle.
"It was my wish," writes Mr. Byrne, "a wish of which my captain

approved, to land secretly if possible. I did not want to be seen
either by my aggrieved friend in the yellow hat, whose motives were

not clear, or by the one-eyed wine-seller, who may or may not have
been affiliated to the devil, or indeed by any other dweller in

that primitive village. But unfortunately the cove was the only
possible landing place for miles; and from the steepness of the

ravine I couldn't make a circuit to avoid the houses."
"Fortunately," he goes on, "all the people were yet in their beds.

It was barelydaylight when I found myself walking on the thick
layer of sodden leaves filling the only street. No soul was

stirring abroad, no dog barked. The silence was profound, and I
had concluded with some wonder that apparently no dogs were kept in

the hamlet, when I heard a low snarl, and from a noisome alley
between two hovels emerged a vile cur with its tail between its

legs. He slunk off silently showing me his teeth as he ran before
me, and he disappeared so suddenly that he might have been the

unclean incarnation of the Evil One. There was, too, something so
weird in the manner of its coming and vanishing, that my spirits,

already by no means very high, became further depressed by the
revolting sight of this creature as if by an unlucky presage."

He got away from the coast unobserved, as far as he knew, then
struggled manfully to the west against wind and rain, on a barren

dark upland, under a sky of ashes. Far away the harsh and desolate
mountains raising their scarped and denuded ridges seemed to wait

for him menacingly. The evening found him fairly near to them,
but, in sailor language, uncertain of his position, hungry, wet,

and tired out by a day of steady tramping over broken ground during
which he had seen very few people, and had been unable to obtain

the slightest intelligence of Tom Corbin's passage. "On! on! I
must push on," he had been saying to himself through the hours of

solitary effort, spurred more by incertitude than by any definite
fear or definite hope.

The lowering daylight died out quickly, leaving him faced by a
broken bridge. He descended into the ravine, forded a narrow

stream by the last gleam of rapid water, and clambering out on the
other side was met by the night which fen like a bandage over his

eyes. The wind sweeping in the darkness the broadside of the
sierra worried his ears by a continuous roaring noise as of a

maddened sea. He suspected that he had lost the road. Even in
daylight, with its ruts and mud-holes and ledges of outcropping

stone, it was difficult to distinguish from the dreary waste of the
moor interspersed with boulders and clumps of naked bushes. But,

as he says, "he steered his course by the feel of the wind," his
hat rammed low on his brow, his head down, stopping now and again

from mere weariness of mind rather than of body - as if not his
strength but his resolution were being overtaxed by the strain of

endeavour half suspected to be vain, and by the unrest of his
feelings.

In one of these pauses borne in the wind faintly as if from very
far away he heard a sound of knocking, just knocking on wood. He

noticed that the wind had lulled suddenly.
His heart started beating tumultuously because in himself he

carried the impression of the desert solitudes he had been
traversing for the last six hours - the oppressive sense of an

uninhabited world. When he raised his head a gleam of light,
illusory as it often happens in dense darkness, swam before his

eyes. While he peered, the sound of feeble knocking was repeated -
and suddenly he felt rather than saw the existence of a massive