He gritted his teeth in an agony of suspense and enforced inaction. As the long minutes crawled by he writhed inwardly in the horror of waiting for the stinging impact of the feathered messengers of death, marshalled every resource of his will in his effort to appear casual, unafraid, confident of friendly reception.
Suddenly the silence of the night hills was broken by a weird sound that rolled down from the heights. He listened, rigid, and realized that some one was striking a small agong. It came from the crest. Three times the faint resonance was carried down, the last note humming long in the tunnel of forest and fading out in slow-dying vibrations.
Listening, he noted a change in the forest about him. Minutes passed, and at last he realized that he was alone, the lurking figures had been recalled. In the reaction fatigue came, and he wrapped himself in the blanket and fell asleep.
At sunrise he was off again, climbing the mountain side, confident that the recall of his midnight visitors had ended all dangers. The night would see him at the summit.... APO!
But with the sense of personal security there came a deep apprehension of what he would find at the end of his strange quest. His worry over the fate of the friend for whom he had made this venture increased with every hour. As the day wore on he fell into a panic of foreboding, scarce noting that the forest had lost its sinister aspects, had opened into a lovely wood of sun-splashed vistas broken here and there by great rugs of thick grass which tempered the beat of the afternoon sun striking through the openings above the frequent clearings.
Suddenly he stopped, sniffing to identify the odor that had rapped at his heedless nostrils for an hour. Disbelieving the testimony of his sense of smell he scanned the woods for visual evidence, for the first time taking in the quiet beauty of the scene. Finding the objects for which he searched he exclaimed aloud in his wonder.
"Pines! Pines! Sus-marie-hosep!"
He drank in the bracing spice of the rare atmosphere, glorying in the clear coolness of the altitude after the months of oppressive heat in the lowlands.
"Real, honest-to-heaven pines—that puts me a clean mile above sea level!"
Worry came again, and he turned to continue his ascent, but halted in midstride as he discovered a form that stood, motionless, upon a grassy plot a few rods above him. A Hillman confronted him!