They sat close in their ambush, walled about with prickly darkness, roofed in by the living night.
Beneath them the sea came and went, rose and fell, rhythmical and somnolent, as it had done in the days when badger and wolf and bear roamed the hill, with none to contest their sovereignty but the hoary old sea-eagle from the cliffs; as it might still do when man had long passed away. Sounds ancient almost as the earth on which they lay, which had lulled them and millions of their forefathers to sleep, were crossed by others, new, man-made, discordant.
Down the road at the back of the covert, not a hundred yards away, came a sudden bustling phut-phut-phut.
"Despatch-rider," said Ernie, peering. "Light out and all. Rushin it to Birling Gap. There's a company of Territorials there, diggin emselves in behind barbed wire to guard the deep-sea cables."
"The Boy-Scouts were layin out all day on the road to Friston, Mr. Chislehurst told me," remarked Ruth. "They took the number of every motor and motor-bike on the road to Newhaven."
She unloosed her hair that fell about her like a torrent of darkness.
A huge beetle twanged by above them; and then in the covert close at hand there was a snuffling and grunting, so loud, so close, so portentous that Ruth, creature of the earth though she was, was startled and paused in her undoing.
"What-ever's that?" she asked, laying a hand on Ernie.
"Hedge-pig, I allow."
"Sounds like it might be a wild boar routin and snoutin and carryin on," she laughed.