All the world about lay in the clear white twilight. The blueberry flats, the bramble-holts, were red. The clouded sky was white, except for that metallic blue tinge in the west, through which, in some thin places, a pale glow of yellower light was now visible, the last rays of the day that had set. It was this world on which the young Englishman looked as, amazed and somewhat affrighted, he walked round the building, searching on all sides for the creature that could hardly yet, had it run away in such a level land, be wholly out of sight.
He went indoors again to make sure that nothing was there, and this time he made a discovery—his tea was gone from his cup. He gave a shudder of disgust, and, leaving his food untouched, put on coat and cap, and went out shutting his door behind him. His spirits sank. It seemed to him that, had it been midnight instead of this blank, even daylight, had his unearthly-looking visitant acted in more unearthly fashion, the circumstances would have had less weird force to impress his mind.
We can, after all, only form conjectures regarding inexplicable incidents from the successive impressions that have been made upon us. This man was not at all given to love of romance or superstition, yet the easy explanation that some man, for purpose of trick or crime, had hidden in the box, did not seem to him to fit the circumstances. He could not make himself believe that the eyes he had seen belonged to a living man; on the other hand, he found it impossible to conceive of a tea-drinking ghost.
About a quarter of a mile away there was a long grove of birch trees, the projecting spur of a second growth of forest that covered the distant rising ground. Towards this Trenholme strode, for it was the only covert near in which a human being could travel unseen. It was more by the impulse of energy, however, than by reasonable hope that he came there, for by the time he had reached the edge of the trees, it was beginning to grow dark, even in the open plain.
No one who has not seen birch trees in their undisturbed native haunts can know how purely white, unmarred by stain or tear, their trunks can be. Trenholme looked in among them. They grew thickly. White—white—it seemed in the gathering gloom that each was whiter than the other; and Trenholme, remembering that his only knowledge of the figure he sought was that it was wrapped in white, recognised the uselessness, the absurdity even, of hoping to find it here, of all places.
Then he went back to the road and started for Turrifs Settlement.
CHAPTER IX.
The settlement called "Turrifs" was not a village; it was only a locality, in which there were a good many houses within the radius of a few square miles.
When Alec Trenholme started off the third time to reproach the recreant driver of the ox-cart, he had no intention of again dealing with him directly. He bent his steps to the largest house in the neighbourhood, the house of the family called Turrifs; whose present head, being the second of his generation on the same farm, held a position of loosely acknowledged pre-eminence. Turrif was a Frenchman, who had had one Scotch forefather through whom his name had come. This, indeed, was the case with many of his neighbours.
Trenholme had had various negotiations with this Turrif and his neighbours, but he had only once been to the house he was now seeking and in the darkness, which had fallen completely during his three-mile walk, he was a little puzzled to find it quickly. Its wooden and weather-greyed walls glimmered but faintly in the night; it was only by following the line of log fences through the flat treeless fields that he found himself at last full in the feeble rays of the candle-light that peeped from its largest window. Trenholme knocked.