t any rate I'm not going to allow chance workers
in the fields to rob me of my night's rest."

"No more am I," assented Cumshaw. "So you don't think there's any
likelihood----."

"I don't think anything at all," I cut in. "I take proper precautions,
that's all."

He made no comment on my unceremonious interruption, but the strange
half-smile he gave me showed that he realised in part at least how his
story had affected me. As a matter of fact I was more perturbed than I
cared to admit. I had been thinking things over all day, and it had just
occurred to me that, seeing we had heard nothing of them since Bryce's
death, it was quite possible that they were even now following up the
false clue that he had laid for them, and which one of them had got away
with the night of the burglary. If that were so, why had they come back
and killed Bryce? It was a curious enough situation, and the more I
thought about it the more I became convinced that I was right. Our
immunity so far was due solely to the fact that the others were well
occupied with the faked plan they had stolen on that memorable evening.
Now on top of that Albert Cumshaw must come with this circumstantial
story of his and upset all my deductions. The strange part of it was,
though my reason told me that he had been a victim of his own brilliant
imagination, part of my mind--that part that believed in second sight
and banshees and were-wolves, and stuff of that sort--told me that he
was not so very much wrong after all.

"I'll get to sleep," he said, interrupting the train of my thoughts.
"I'll be fresh when my turn comes for guard."

"Tell me," I said, for the matter had been puzzling me all night, "where
did you learn to light your pipe with red-hot coals?"

"Oh, that," he said with a laugh. "I saw you doing it earlier in the
evening, and I made up my mind that what you did I could do."

"Then it must have burnt you."

"Horribly," he said with a grimace. "Good-night."

CHAPTER III.

THE PROMISED LAND.

"This," I remarked, "is the sort of country Adam Lindsay Gordon would
have loved. No man but he could do justice to it."

"We've been out seven days," said Cumshaw, "we've travelled God knows
how many miles, we've climbed up a Hades of a lot of mountains, and I
don't think there's a blind creek for twenty miles that we haven't
followed to the end and back again, and at the end of it all we're no
nearer the Valley than we were when we started.