stling in the black mysterious depths of the bush on either hand, told
that his presence was not altogether unknown to its keen denizens. To
the dwellers in towns and artificiality there would have been something
inexpressibly weird and nerve-stirring in this mystery-suggesting
solitude, in the great sweep of the bush-clad spurs, black and gloomy in
shadow, silvern and ghostly where the moon reached them, and in the
stealthy unknown sounds coming unexpectedly, now on this hand now on
that, from the darksome depths of their recesses, but to this man it all
brought a strange tightening of the heart. All this mystery of shaggy
wood, and sphinx-like _krantz_ looming grey in the moonlight, had been
his--his property, his very own--and now it was so no longer. The cloud
of despondency was deepening down upon him again.

He had been walking now rather more than an hour, and the moon, mounting
higher, was pouring down her pale vertical beams right upon these
labyrinthine recesses. Then he struck off from the valley bottom, and
ascending, cautiously, noiselessly, the steep and stony hillside, gained
a point some fifteen yards higher up.

The position was formed by some small boulders, overhung by _spek-boem_,
and it commanded an ample view of anything passing beneath. He knew the
spot well, as indeed he knew every inch of that bushy maze, in parts so
thick and tangled and thorn-studded as to be well-nigh impenetrable;
many a fine bushbuck ram had he stopped in mid career from this very
point when they had been driving out the kloofs, during one of those
hunts to which he would from time to time convene his neighbours. Here,
as he lay, he scanned the open smoothness of the grassy valley bottom.
But upon it there was no sign of any moving life.

The kloof ended in a mass of tumbled terraced cliff, overhung by a row
of straight-stemmed, plumed euphorbia; with aloes, gnome-like in the
moonlight, caught here and there in crevice or on ledge. Within the
face of the rock slanted black clefts, constituting a complete rookery
for the denizens of what his neighbours termed "Wyvern's
vermin-preserve." And it was, from his point of view, the very heart of
the surrounding maze, and was known as the Third Kloof.

At the meetings of the Gydisdorp Farmers' Association, Wyvern's name was
held in evil odour on this account, yet now, lying out in the ghostly,
solitary night, he thought of it with glee; for was he not possessor,
even if