, as noiselessly as Indians, we entered the wood.

Once within it, it was as though the sun had suddenly sunk from the
heavens. The pines, of magnificent height and girth, were so closely
set that far overhead, where the branches began, was a heavy roof of
foliage, impervious to the sunshine, brooding, dark and sullen as
a thundercloud, over the cavernous world beneath. There was no
undergrowth, no clinging vines, no bloom, no color; only the dark,
innumerable tree trunks and the purplish-brown, scented, and slippery
earth. The air was heavy, cold, and still, like cave air; the silence as
blank and awful as the silence beneath the earth.

The minister and I stole through the dusk, and for a long time heard
nothing but our own breathing and the beating of our hearts. But coming
to a sluggish stream, as quiet as the wood through which it crept,
and following its slow windings, we at last heard a voice, and in the
distance made out dark forms sitting on the earth beside that sombre
water. We went on with caution, gliding from tree to tree and making
no noise. In the cheerless silence of that place any sound would have
shattered the stillness like a pistol shot.

Presently we came to a halt, and, ourselves hidden by a giant trunk,
looked out on stealers and stolen. They were gathered on the bank of
the stream, waiting for the boat from the Santa Teresa. The lady whom we
sought lay like a fallen flower on the dark ground beneath a pine. She
did not move, and her eyes were shut. At her head crouched the negress,
her white garments showing ghostlike through the gloom. Beneath the
next tree sat Diccon, his hands tied behind him, and around him my Lord
Carnal's four knaves. It was Diccon's voice that we had heard. He was
still speaking, and now we could distinguish the words.

"So Sir Thomas chains him there," he said,--"right there to that tree
under which you are sitting, Jacky Bonhomme." Jacques incontinently
shifted his position. "He chains him there, with one chain around his
neck, one around his waist, and one around his ankles. Then he sticks me
a bodkin through his tongue." A groan of admiration from his audience.
"Then they dig, before his very eyes, a grave,--shallow enough they
make it, too,--and they put into it, uncoffined, with only a long white
shroud upon him, the man he murdered. Then they cover the grave. You're
sitting on it now, you other Jacky."

"Godam!" cried the rascal addressed, and removed with expe