nd flung out both arms with a gesture of
desperate weariness. Yet sleep was far from him, and he knew it;
unless he chose to induce it by the only means ready to his hand.

And to-night he did so choose. In general he had steeled himself to
resist the temptation to smoke no more than was needed to quicken and
clarify thought. But the short talk with Richardson had set all his
over-strained nerves on edge. His sum of sleep in the past week did
not amount to twenty-four hours, and for once in a way oblivion must be
purchased at any cost.

Going over to the tall tobacco-jar that supported his library, he
refilled his pouch with cool deliberation, stretched himself out upon
the deck-lounge, and smoked pipe after pipe, till the portion of the
drug contained in each accumulated to a perceptible dose. Then the
great Dream Compeller took pity upon him, deadening thought, feeling,
consciousness itself, till the pipe fell from between his fingers,--and
he slept.

CHAPTER II.

"And, at each turn, it seemed as though
Fate some huge net round both did throw
To stay their feet, and dim their sight."
--W. Morris.

Three weeks later, on a diamond-bright morning of early May, Eldred
Lenox was in the saddle, riding at a foot's pace along a strip of a
path that links the Strawberry Bank Hotel with Dalhousie's central
hill. Brutus trotted soberly to heel, while Shaitan--a black Galloway,
half Biluch, half Arab--tossed an impatient head, sneezed several times
in succession, and generally declared his intention of taking matters
into his own hands, so soon as he should reach the broader expanse of
Terah Mall. But Lenox, impelled by an inbred desire to climb, was
minded to push on to the higher, emptier levels of Bakrota--the great
hill that towered, formidable, directly ahead of him. For the
chalet-like dwellings of Dalhousie are scattered sparsely over three
hills, Bakrota, Terah, Potrain; and the summit of the last and lowest
is crowned by Strawberry Bank Hotel, mainly the resort of captains and
subalterns from the four plains stations of the district, doing their
two months of signalling, Garrison Class, or of unadulterated loafing,
as the case may be.

Lenox himself came under none of these headings. The man had a trick
of refusing to be classed collectively, soldier though he was; a trick
of isolation, inbred, unconscious, the outcome, perhaps, of much
solitary wandering, of intimate association w