hat he was, was a condition of affairs so inevitable that the
chauffeur made no attempt to evade it; merely put on speed and
headed straight for the distant High Street for the purpose of
getting rid of his escort as soon as possible; and Lennard, putting
on speed, likewise, and keeping pace with him, ran him neck and neck,
until the heath was left far and away behind, the darkness gave
place to a glitter of street lamps, the lonely roads to populous
thoroughfares, and the way was left clear for Cleek to get off
unfollowed and unmolested.

CHAPTER VI

Screened by that darkness, and close sheltered by the matted gorse
which fringed and dotted the expanse of the nearby heath, he had been
an interested witness to the entire proceeding.

"Played, my lad, played!" he commented, putting his thoughts into
mumbled words of laughing approval, as Lennard, taking the taxicab
under guard, escorted it and its occupants out of the immediate
neighbourhood; then, excessive caution prompting him to quell even
this little ebullition, he shut up like an oyster and neither
spoke, nor moved, nor made any sound until the two vehicles were
represented by nothing but a purring noise dwindling away into
the distance.

When that time came, however, he rose, and facing the heath, forged
out across its mist-wrapped breadth with that long, swinging,
soldierly stride peculiar unto him, his forehead puckered with
troubled thought, his jaw clamped, and his lips compressed until
his mouth seemed nothing more than a bleak slit gashed in a gray,
unpleasant-looking mask.

But after a while the night and the time and the place worked their
own spell, and the troubled look dropped away; the dull eyes lighted,
the grim features softened, and the curious crooked smile that was
Nature's birth-gift to him broke down the rigid lines of the "bleak
slit" and looped up one corner of his mouth.

It was magic ground, this heath--a place thick set as the Caves of
Manheur with the Sapphires of Memory--and to a nature such as his
these things could not but appeal.

Here Dollops had come into his life--a starveling, an outcast;
derelict even in the very morning time of youth--a bit of human
wreckage that another ten minutes would have seen stranded forever
upon the reefs of crime.

Here, too--on that selfsame night, when the devil had been cheated,
and the boy had gone, and they two stood alone together in the mist
and darkness--he had first laid asid