that infinitesimal dot be the hotel that had held forty people the night before?
It was Miss O’Flannigan who made the contemptible suggestion that we should return to Rhyddu and get particulars of the sunrise and the view from the landlady’s daughter. I repelled the suggestion with appropriate spirit; but half an hour later, when, with acute neuralgia in the muscles above my knees, I was reduced to lifting each leg in succession with my hands, I hardly dared to think of the horse-hair sofa in the parlour of the Quellyn Arms. As we dragged ourselves up at the pace relentlessly demanded by Griffith Roberts, all sense of connection with the world below went from us. It was weeks since we had supped at Rhyddu, years since the tourist shouted his final warnings after us at Mahntooroch. We were in another planet, toiling up through some dim, endless purgatory to ever higher levels in the manner so trimly arranged by the newer Spiritualism—only that instead of the corresponding moral elevation, the one emotion in which we were conscious of any progress was detestation of Griffith Roberts. A sodden twilight, not born of sunset or moonrise, came down about us, and the tormented vapours writhed up to meet it from the voids on either hand as we went delicately along the ridge that leads, like a horse’s crest, from shoulder to summit of the mountain. The ridge grew more and more slender, and we picked our aching steps more and more carefully. One of the Tommies’ saddles would have been almost wide enough to have spanned it comfortably at one place—the happy Tommies, now doubtless sleeping like infants in their little beds at Rhyddu; and Miss O’Flannigan has since admitted her almost uncontrollable desire to traverse it after the manner of a serpent.
It was half-past nine o’clock when Griffith Roberts led his now speechless prey up to the tiny plateau whereon were a large cairn of stones, two men, and two squalid wooden shanties.
“Ze taap,” observed Griffith Roberts, coldly.
CHAPTER VIII.
A solitary candle struggled with the obscurity as we stumbled through a narrow door into the shanty indicated to us. It illuminated principally the features of a young gentleman in a check ulster and a Tam o’ Shanter cap, who sat behind it with a note-book and pencil and an indefinite air of being connected with the Press, and his eye-glasses flashed upon us with almost awful inquiry as the light caught them beneath the dashing tilt of his cap. The next most immediate impression was of the cabin of a fifth-rate coasting steamer: dingy wooden walls, a bare seat running round them, two tables, three cramped doorways, and a pigmy stove. That was the sum-total of the surroundings; but the fact that there was a fire in the stove crowded out all deficiencies for the first ten minutes.
The cold was clinging, inescapable, unbelieveable, at least for people who had come sweltering up in light attire from a world where it was midsummer and behaved as such. The opening of the stove was about as large as the lens of a Kodak, and might have heated us through if moved up and down our persons, as a painter burns old paint off with a brazier. Failing this, we had to reverse the process, and rotate endlessly before that single, sullen glow, while from the corner the twin malignity of the double eye-glasses blazed upon us.
“I thought I was goin’ to be all alone up here to-night,” said a voice from behind the eye-glasses—a voice of that class which, like Scott’s poetry, “scorns to be obscure,” and proclaims its natal Brixton in clarion tones. “I’ve bin kicking my ’eels up ’ere since five o’clock, and I cawn’t say it’s bin lively!” The speaker permitted to himself a dramatic yawn, followed by a giggle of