288

XXVIII.

WHEN entered from the Okewell road the dale of Aspurt was a place of green meadows, cooled and lit by shimmering, singing water. With shallow and swirl and eddy the brook came windingly down; in the lower reach it steadied and glided leisurely, broadening and deepening; and there the shadows of trout innumerable fell from their poised, plump bodies upon the sunned, gritty bottom of the stream. It was a lonesome little dale, though among the rushes and over the shrubby fringes of the water a thousand swooping dragon-flies clashed gauzy wings and flashed their opalescent mail, and from the flowers the gossiping wild bees took their tribute; but these and the fish were the only inhabitants to be seen. On the left hand the sward swelled protuberant, with doubled curves from a gentle cleft into demi-globes like the breasts of a dryad recumbent; on the right hand, northward, the stream was flanked and bent to its course by a wooded Edge that rose to the moory plateau above. For nearly two miles upward the dale of Aspurt was a region of calm, inviting retreat; thereafter it narrowed, hardened, shelved, changed into stony wilderness, and rang discordant with the shriek of preying birds.

A cart-track, half-effaced, ascended with the bend of the stream from the highway; it went northwesterly by a long sweep, that failed, however, to shut the turnpike road from view; it led past broken boundary walls and fields untended to what had once been a farmstead, the house of rustic independence, a yeoman's home. But the place was silent and deserted; the last scion of a decaying order had been bought out of the small estate. Solid and massive, the walls of antique masonry still stood, though J. BRANDRED, 1562, was graven on the lintel of the doorway. But the thatch had fallen from the gapped rafters, the beams had yielded, snapdragon flowered on the wall-plates, a pear-crab was rooted in the house-place, grass flourished on the earthen floors. The dark, unwindowed barn beside the steading still kept its shingle-stone roofing, however, and the stamp of horses sounded within. The yeoman peered inside; the bay gelding turned ear and eye, and the roadster lifted its nose from a heap of grass to snuffle welcome to the trotter.

"Here's the cattle. They're this dale, sure eneugh," the yeoman said. Best put our nags in, too, Jeruel?"

"They're ' this dale, sure eneugh," he repeated. But where? Not in the farmstead, not in the barn; not among the sparse trees under the Edge on the other side of the water.

As the two men went on and up, the dale narrowed

in on them rapidly; treeless crags on both sides hemmed it in, the shelving floor of stone cropped out among sparse herbage; the end of pudding-bag street was in view.

Yonder, half a mile ahead, the stern walls of the plateau in which the dale was gashed were lifted into towers and ramparts of fossiled limestone. "Chilcutt Castle, mebbe," the American jested bitterly, with a return of yesterday's disappointment. "By gum! he growled, "seems many a fortni't sin' I fun' out theer wa'ant no Chilcutt Castle." There was one huge mass of rock, of castellate build, that stood in the ultimate head of the dale, where the straitness swerved into a stony path that climbed round the crag's side to the moorland. The brook's right bank itself drew there to an end; it ceased in front of a bastion which flanked the castle-like crag and hid the source of the Aspurt. Above and beyond there was nothing but open moor for leagues, except the hamlet that nestled, a couple of miles to the northward, in a green hollow out of sight.

'They're somewheres hereabout," the yeoman said, as he paused, a rod from the bastion. "They must be somewheres here. But where?"

"Playin' 'possum," the American said. He lifted his voice." Hi! Flamenker!" The answer was the scream of birds and the desolate echo.

The two men were come to a place of barren savagery. Blank skulls and twisted bones of horned

sheep lay bleaching under the crags; the tireless screech of hawks tore the ear; above and about the rocks a hundred gleds hung on motionless pinions or sailed in endless circlings, watching to swoop; in a lower note the garrulous chatter of ravens was heard, as they fought and cuffed each other on the wing; mag, mag! the pynots gossiped without cease.

Somebody's disturbed these fowl," Matt shouted in his comrade's ear. 'They're somewheres hereabout, I'll wager!"

"Hi! Flamenker!"

The cry was hardly audible, so loud was the winged uproar; the air from the windy moor was filled with the beaky clamour. A gled swooped screeching down, and only a swift slash with the whipstock baffled it from the American's eyes.

pair!

"By gosh!" he cried, "we're a pair! Injuns'd larf at us-we've disremembered the pateran again. Keep them devils off me while I looks."

He stooped, and searched the grey-green floor of shingle and spare grass in front of the castellate crag. Whip in hand the yeoman turned to look down the dale; the ruined farmstead and even the turnpike road were still in sight.

"Got it!" the American signalled. "Here's a cross in the stone, and here's another, by gum!" The pateran led them to the foot of the bastion and around its northward flank; between the bastion and the tower it seemed to guard they came upon the low,

round, natural arch, serrated like a shark's-tooth moulding, from which the Aspurt flowed.

"They're in there, happen," Matt shouted in his companion's ear. "They've driven these howling brutes of birds out, belike. I'm going in."

He stepped into the water that swirled shin deep through the width of the archway, and, stooping, entered the gloomy cleft. "Dahlia!" he shouted, and heard for answer the clanging echoes of his voice and the grim laugh of Bosswel Leeke.

Matt found himself within a lofty cavern, the outermost of a chain of caves that were threaded upon the subterranean stream. "Dahlia!" he called again, advancing as he spoke, and his call reverberated almost musically among the petrifications of the crypt.

A twilight gleam fell from a window-like fissure in the wall of crag; it lit the dark rush of the Aspurt, it revealed the fugitives huddled at the foot of a pillar of wet rock. The pillar was rugous, huge, branchyit seemed a massy tree-trunk turned to stone to uphold the dripping roof.

They had come to the Lazar's Crypt-in ancient days the den of lepers excommunicate. Leprous yet, with a greasy fungous whiteness, appeared the knobby growths of stalagmitic pillars and drooping stalactites. The air was cold and damp, wet and chill with a deadly perspiration that clammily oozed and dripped with rhythmic spatter from the groinings of the streaming