suddenly, for I wished to turn their thoughts away
from it, "are you forgetting it's dinner-time?"

"I clean forgot, captain, by all that's holy," said he.

"And not feeling very hungry, either," exclaims Dolly Venn, who had
begun to cough in the steaming vapour, which we laughed at. I was
anxious about the lad already, and it didn't comfort me to hear Seth
Barker breathing like an ox and telling me that it should be clearer in
the valley.

I said, "Yes, it might be," and all together we began to march again. A
sharp walk carried us from the hill path through the tangle of bushes
into the woods wherefrom danger first had come to us. The night had set
in by this time and a clear moon was showing in the sky. Rare and
beautiful, I must say, that moonlight was, shimmering through the hazy
blue vapour and coming down almost as a carpet of violet between the
broad green leaves. No scene that I have witnessed upon the stage of a
theatre was more pleasing to my eyes than that silent forest with its
lawns of grass and its patches of wonderful, fantastic light, and its
strange silence, and the loneliness of which it seemed to speak. So
awesome was it that I do not wonder we went a considerable way in
silence. We were afraid, perhaps, to tell each other what we thought.
When Peter Bligh cried out at last, we started at the sound of his
voice as though a stranger hailed us.

"Yonder," cried he, in a voice grown deep and husky; "yonder, captain,
what do you make of that? Is it living men or dead, or do my eyes
deceive me?"

I stopped short at his words and the others halted with me. We were in
a deep glen by this time; and all the surrounding woodland was shut
from our sight. Great trees spread their branches like a canopy above
us; the grass was soft and downy to the feet; the bewitching violet
light gave unnatural yet wonderful colours to the flowery bushes about
us. No fairy glen could have showed a heart more wonderful; and yet, I
say, we four stood on the borders of it, with white faces and blinking
eyes, and thoughts which none would change even with his own brother.

Why did he do it, you ask? Ah, I'll tell you why.

There were three men sleeping in the glen, and the face of one was
plainly to be seen. He lay upon his back, his hands clenched, his limbs
stiff, his eyes wide open as though some fearsome apparition had come
to him and was not to be passed by. Of the others, one had dropped face
downward and lay huddled