rs' highway, walking circumspectly,
scanning the sky-line of every hill, and searching the folds of every
valley, for any moving figure.

Although it was now well on toward dark, and the sun was down an hour or
so, I could see the robbers' road before me, in a trough of the winding
hills, where the brook plowed down from the higher barrows, and the
coving banks were roofed with furze. At present there was no one
passing, neither post nor sentinel, so far as I could descry; but I
thought it safer to wait a little, as twilight melted into night; and
then I crept down a seam of the highland, and stood upon the
Doone track.

As the road approached the entrance, it became more straight and strong,
like a channel cut from rock, with the water brawling darkly along the
naked side of it. Not a tree or bush was left, to shelter a man from
bullets; all was stern, and stiff, and rugged, as I could not help
perceiving, even through the darkness: and a smell as of churchyard
mold, a sense of being boxed in and cooped, made me long to be
out again.

And here I was, or seemed to be, particularly unlucky; for as I drew
near the very entrance, lightly of foot, and warily, the moon (which had
often been my friend) like an enemy broke upon me, topping the eastward
ridge of rock, and filling all the open spaces with the play of wavering
light. I shrank back into the shadowy quarter on the right side of the
road, and gloomily employed myself to watch the triple entrance, on
which the moonlight fell askew.

All across and before the three rude and beetling archways hung a felled
oak overhead, black and thick and threatening. This, as I heard before,
could be let fall in a moment, so as to crush a score of men, and bar
the approach of horses. Behind this tree the rocky mouth was spanned, as
by a gallery, with brushwood and piled timber, all upon a ledge or
stone, where thirty men might lurk unseen, and fire at any invader. From
that rampart it would be impossible to dislodge them, because the rock
fell sheer below them twenty feet, or it may be more; while overhead it
towered three hundred, and so jutted over that nothing could be cast
upon them, even if a man could climb the height. And the access to this
portcullis place--if I may so call it, being no portcullis there--was
through certain rocky chambers known to the tenants only.

But the cleverest of their devices, and the most puzzling to an enemy,
was that, instead of one mouth onl