Haviland, as
he examined the dead bird. "We'll have to be contented with it, though,
for time's up. Come along, we must get back now."

Bearing off their spoil in triumph, they had gained the centre of the
wood--the spot, in fact, where the old tragedy had occurred, and close
to that whereon they had so badly frightened the keeper. Suddenly
Haviland felt a hand on his arm, heard a brief whisper:

"Stop! Something moving."

At first he could hear nothing; then his ears detected a sound, and his
nerves thrilled. As the other had said, it was something moving, and
instinctively he realised that it was something heavier, more formidable
than any of the light-footed denizens of an English wood. Somehow his
mind reverted to the grim legend. What if it were true, and the
strangled man actually did walk, with all the marks of his horrible and
violent death upon him? In front, where the rides of the wood
intersected each other, the moonlight streamed through in a broad patch,
rendering blacker still the pitchy blackness beneath the trees beyond.
The stillness and excitement, together with the gruesome associations of
the place, had got upon their nerves even more than they knew. What if
some awful apparition--appalling, horrible beyond words--were to emerge
from yonder blackness, to stand forth in the ghostly moonlight, and
petrify them with the unimaginable terrors of a visitant from beyond the
grave? Haviland's pulses seemed to stand still as the sounds drew
nearer and nearer. A keeper's? No. They were too quick, too heavy,
too blundering, somehow. Then Anthony breathed one word:

"Dog!"

A dog! Of course, that solved the mystery. But even then the jump from
supernatural fears to the material hardly seemed to mend matters. A dog
meant a keeper, of course, unless it were a midnight poacher like
themselves, in which event it would give them a wide berth; but this was
too much to hope. On the other hand, if it were accompanying a keeper
on his midnight round, the brute would certainly attack them; and that
it was a large and heavy animal they could determine by the sound of its
quick, fierce rushes to and fro, and a sort of deep-toned grunt which it
uttered now and then as it snuffed the ground.

Breathlessly they crouched. Ha! It was coming! The sound of its
approaching rush in the pitchy blackness was almost upon them--then it
passed. It had not discovered them yet, but evidently suspected their
pre