He started up in bed and looked round the room. A man was standing with his back to him in the act of picking up the chair he had just thrown over. In the dim starlight Gray could just see him as he bent over the chair. With a sharp exclamation Gray sprang out of bed and made a dash at him. But the man was too quick. He wriggled out of Gray's grasp as a snake might wriggle out of its captor's clutch, and keeping his head well down, that Gray might not see his face, he dashed out of the window and across the court-yard. Gray saw him disappear over the fence, and run swiftly down the hollow.
He struck a light and carefully examined the room. His purse was safe. Everything in his pocket was left intact.
Gray's story caused great excitement next morning. There had never been an attempt at robbery in the station before.
"It must have been a black fellow," Mr. Stuart said. But Gray was certain it was no black man. If it had not been absurd to think of such a thing, he would have said it was Lumley, the Mortons' gardener.
But he dismissed that idea as absurd and impossible.
His next day's ride took him into the heart of the hill-country. The track was far less clearly marked here, and often difficult to follow. It ran through deep lonely ravines walled in by precipitous heights of dark rock, and along the sides of mighty hills from which glimpses could be got of still higher hills, towering up into the still blue sky. Some of the hills were darkly wooded, others were clothed in rich grass and flowering shrubs almost to the summits; others again, and these more numerous as Gray rode on, were bare of blade or leaf, heaped with dark scarred rocks, waterless, desolate.
Gray missed his road once or twice that day; and once he was unable to cross a furious torrent which had swept down the frail bridge laid across it, and was forced to make a long round.
There was a small cottage in these parts kept by M'Pherson, an old stock-keeper of Mr. Macquoid's. Gray had hoped to leave it far behind him in this day's journey, but he was only too glad to see it when he had at last regained the track just after sunset. He and his horse were both tired out.
The old man came to his cottage door as Gray clattered up the hilly path. He looked at Gray, and then beyond him.
"Ye're kindly welcome, lad. But hasna your mate come up wi' ye?"