re before me.
For John Silence at work inspired me with a kind of awe. He looked so
diminutive among these giant twisted trees, while yet I knew that his
purpose and his knowledge were so great, and even in hurry he was
dignified. The fancy that we were playing some queer, exaggerated game
together met the fact that we were two men dancing upon the brink of
some possible tragedy, and the mingling of the two emotions in my mind
was both grotesque and terrifying.

He never turned in his mad chase, but pushed rapidly on, while I panted
after him like a figure in some unreasoning nightmare. And, as I ran, it
came upon me that he had been aware all the time, in his quiet, internal
way, of many things that he had kept for his own secret consideration;
he had been watching, waiting, planning from the very moment we entered
the shade of the wood. By some inner, concentrated process of mind,
dynamic if not actually magical, he had been in direct contact with the
source of the whole adventure, the very essence of the real mystery. And
now the forces were moving to a climax. Something was about to happen,
something important, something possibly dreadful. Every nerve, every
sense, every significant gesture of the plunging figure before me
proclaimed the fact just as surely as the skies, the winds, and the face
of the earth tell the birds the time to migrate and warn the animals
that danger lurks and they must move.

In a few moments we reached the foot of the mound and entered the
tangled undergrowth that lay between us and the sunlight of the field.
Here the difficulties of fast travelling increased a hundredfold. There
were brambles to dodge, low boughs to dive under, and countless tree
trunks closing up to make a direct path impossible. Yet Dr. Silence
never seemed to falter or hesitate. He went, diving, jumping, dodging,
ducking, but ever in the same main direction, following a clean trail.
Twice I tripped and fell, and both times, when I picked myself up again,
I saw him ahead of me, still forcing a way like a dog after its quarry.
And sometimes, like a dog, he stopped and pointed--human pointing it
was, psychic pointing, and each time he stopped to point I heard that
faint high hissing in the air beyond us. The instinct of an infallible
dowser possessed him, and he made no mistakes.

At length, abruptly, I caught up with him, and found that we stood at
the edge of the shallow pond Colonel Wragge had mentioned in his account