When I looked out on the world again it was to see that the day had already broken, and a dirty and bedraggled Albert Cumshaw was making his way towards us with slow and painful steps.
Chapter IV.
WE ENTER THE VALLEY.
I cannot explain why just at that instant my heart gave a thump. There was nothing for it to thump about. Cumshaw, toiling up the slope, for all his woe-begone look, was the most ordinary figure imaginable, and there was nothing in the landscape to excite or rivet attention. It was a white dawn, and, though the rain had ceased long before, everything was still dull and grey. In the hollows the mist lingered and hung between us and the further view like a great white curtain. That and the advancing Albert Cumshaw completed the picture, a picture that was neither interesting nor sensational. Yet at the sight, as I've already stated, my heart jumped queerly and unaccountably. Do coming events really ever cast their shadows before them? Are we sometimes granted visions of "the things beyond the dome?" I do not know, and, even if I did, I would not care to express a definite opinion in my own case. I have seen things dangerously like coincidences happen so often in my own experience that I have grown chary of either affirming or denying that there is something more than chance at the bottom of it all. Still the fact remains that twice within twenty-four hours the same queer feeling crept over me, and on each occasion the course of events proved that it was premonition. But that is running a shade ahead of the story.
I ran down the slope to meet Cumshaw, and the first thing I noticed was that there was a great livid bruise across his right temple.
"You've got a nasty knock there on your forehead," I greeted him, in the casual self-contained fashion of the men who live in the open.
He answered me with one of those laughs that are nothing more than almost soundless chuckles.
"Is it hurting?" I enquired with a trace of anxiety in my voice.
"Hurting, hell!" he said impolitely. "Of course it is."