Winthrope shook his head.
“Then he’s hurt!–he’s hurt by that savage creature, and you’ve run off and left him–”
“No, no, Miss Genevieve, I must insist! The fellow is not even scratched.”
“Then why–?”
“It was the horror of it all. It actually made me ill.”
“You frightened me almost to death. Did the beast chase you?”
“That would have been better, in a way. Really, it was horrible! I’m still sick over it, Miss Genevieve.”
“But tell me about it. Did you set fire to the bushes in the cleft, as Mr. Blake–”
“Yes; after we had fetched what we could carry of that long grass–two big trusses. It grows ten or twelve feet tall, and is now quite dry. Part of it Blake made into torches, and we fired the bush all across the foot of the cleft. Really, one would not have thought there was that much dry wood in so green a dell. On either side of the rill the grass and brush flared like tinder, and the flames swept up the cleft far quicker than we had expected. We could hear them crackling and roaring louder than ever after the smoke shut out our view.”