ars, and his eyeballs felt as if they would burst
from their sockets. He had nearly bitten his swollen tongue in two
falling over an unseen peat-cutting, and blood-flecked foam gathered on
his lips.

God, how he ran! But he was no longer among bog and heather. He was
running--shambling now--along a road. The loping pursuit of that
nameless, shapeless Something sounded like an echo in his head.

He was nearing a village, but saw nothing save a red mist that swam
before him like a fog. The road underfoot seemed to rise and fall in
wavelike undulations. Still he ran, with sobbing gasps and limbs that
swerved under his weight; at his elbow hung death unnamable, and the
fear of it urged him on while every instinct of his exhausted body
called out to him to fling up his hands and end it.

Out of the mist ahead rose the rough outline of a building by the
roadside; it was the village smithy, half workshop, half dwelling. The
road here skirted a patch of grass, and the moonlight, glistening on the
dew, showed the dark circular scars of the turf where, for a generation,
the smith's peat fires had heated the great iron hoops that tyred the
wheels of the wains. One of these was even then lying on the ground with
the turves placed in readiness for firing in the morning, and in the
throbbing darkness of Maynard's consciousness a voice seemed to speak
faintly--the voice of a girl:

"_There's a Thing that hunts people to death. But iron--cold iron--it
cannot cross._"

The sweat of death was already on his brow as he reeled sideways,
plunging blindly across the uneven tufts of grass. His feet caught in
some obstruction and he pitched forward into the sanctuary of the huge
iron tyre--a spasm of cramp twisting his limbs up under him.

As he fell a great blackness rose around him, and with it the bewildered
clamour of awakened dogs.

* * * * *

Dr. Stanmore came down the flagged path from the smith's cottage,
pulling on his gloves. A big car was passing slowly up the village
street, and as it came abreast the smithy the doctor raised his hat.

The car stopped, and the driver, a fair-haired girl, leant sideways from
her seat.

"Good-morning, Dr. Stanmore! What's the matter here? Nothing wrong with
any of Matthew's children, is there?"

The Doctor shook his head gravely.

"No, Lady Dorothy; they're all at school. This is no one belonging to
the family--a stranger who was taken mysteriously ill la