to the hilltop. He came to the place, and having lit his lantern he
uncovered the bars, and laid them on the barrow; they were as he had
left them. When he had loaded them, the same fear struck him suddenly
cold again, of something near him; and he thought for a moment he
would have swooned; but sitting down on the barrow in the cool air he
presently came to himself. Then he essayed to wheel the barrow in the
dark. But he stumbled often, and once upset the barrow and spilled his
load. Thus, though fearing discovery, he was forced to light the
lantern and set it upon the barrow, and so at last he came to the
house; where he disposed the bars at the bottom of a chest of which he
had the key, covering them with papers, and then went to bed in a kind
of fever, his teeth chattering, till he fell into a wretched sleep
which lasted till dawn.

In his sleep he dreamed a fearful dream; he seemed to be sitting on
the ground by the Camp, holding the gold in his arms; the Camp, in his
dream was as it was before he had cleared it, all grown up with trees.
Suddenly out from among the trees there came a man in rusty tarnished
armour, with a pale wild face and a little beard, which seemed all
clotted with moisture; he held in his hand a pike or spear, and he
came swiftly and furiously upon Walter as though he would smite him.
But it seemed as though his purpose changed; for standing aside he
watched Walter with evil and piercing eyes, so that it seemed to
Walter that he would sooner have been smitten. And then he woke, but
in anguish, for the man still seemed to stand beside him; until he
made a light and saw no one.

He arose feeling broken and ill; but he met his mother with a smile,
and told her that he had determined to do what would please her, and
work no more at the Camp. And he told the men that he would dig no
more, but that they were to level the place and so leave it. And so
they did, murmuring sore.

The next week was a very miserable one for Walter; he could not have
believed that a man's heart should be so heavy. It seemed to him that
he lay, like the poor bones that he had found beneath the treasure,
crushed and broken and stifled under the weight of it. He was tempted
to do wild things with the gold; to bury it again in the Camp, to drop
it into the mud of the pool that lay near the house. In fevered dreams
he seemed to row himself in a boat upon a dark sea, and to throw the
bars one by one into the water; the reason