amid the endless thundering, in the turbulent desolation around him,
through the roar of wind in his ears, he seemed to catch deadened sounds
resembling distant seaward cannonading--_real_ cannonading--as though
individual shots, dully distinct, dominated for a few moments the unbroken
uproar of surf and gale.

He listened, straining his ears, alert, intent upon the sounds he ought to
recognize--the sounds he knew so well.

Only the ceaseless pounding of the sea assailed his ears.

Three wild duck, widgeon, came speeding through the fog; he breasted the
wind, balanced heavily on both crutches and one leg, and shoved his gun
upward.

At the same instant the mist in front and overhead became noisy with wild
fowl, rising in one great, panic-stricken, clamoring cloud. He hesitated;
a muffled, thudding sound came to him over the unseen sea, growing louder,
nearer, dominating the gale, increasing to a rattling clatter.

Suddenly a great cloudy shape loomed up through the whirling mist
ahead--an enormous shadow in the fog--a gigantic spectre rushing inland on
vast and ghostly pinions.

As the man shrank on his crutches, looking up, the aeroplane swept past
overhead--a wounded, wavering, unsteady, unbalanced thing, its right
aileron dangling, half stripped, and almost mangled to a skeleton.

Already it was slanting lower toward the forest like a hard-hit duck,
wing-crippled, fighting desperately for flight-power to the very end. Then
the inland mist engulfed it.

And after it hobbled Wayland, painfully, two brace of dead ducks and his
slung fowling piece bobbing on his back, his rubber-shod crutches groping
and probing among drenched rocks and gullies full of kelp, his left leg in
splints hanging heavily.

He could not go fast; he could not go very far. Further inland, foggy
gorse gave place to broom and blighted bracken, all wet, sagging with
rain. Then he crossed a swale of brown reeds and tussock set with little
pools of water, opaque and grey in the rain.

Where the outer moors narrowed he turned westward; then a strip of low,
thorn-clad cliff confronted him, up which he toiled along a V-shaped cleft
choked with ferns.

The spectral forest of Laeis lay just beyond, its wind-tortured branches
tossing under a leaden sky.

East and west lonely moors stretched away into the depths of the mist;
southward spread the sea; to the north lay the wide woods of Laeis, equally
deserted now in this sad and empty land.

He