Dropping the glasses back into their case, my companion began to tug at his left ear.
“Have we been over-confident?” he said, narrowing his eyes in speculative fashion. “No less than three times I have had the idea that something, or some one, has just dropped out of sight, behind me, as I focused...”
“What do you mean, Smith?”
“Are we”—he glanced about him as though the vastness were peopled with listening Chinamen—“followed?”
Silently we looked into one another’s eyes, each seeking for the dread which neither had named. Then:
“Come on Petrie!” said Smith, grasping my arm; and at quick march we were off again.
Cragmire Tower stood upon a very slight eminence, and what had looked like a green tongue, from the moorland slopes above, was in fact a creek, flanked by lush land, which here found its way to the sea. The house which we were come to visit consisted in a low, two-story building, joining the ancient tower on the east with two smaller outbuildings. There was a miniature kitchen-garden, and a few stunted fruit trees in the northwest corner; the whole being surrounded by a gray stone wall.
The shadow of the tower fell sharply across the path, which ran up almost alongside of it. We were both extremely warm by reason of our long and rapid walk on that hot day, and this shade should have been grateful to us. In short, I find it difficult to account for the unwelcome chill which I experienced at the moment that I found myself at the foot of the time-worn monument. I know that we both pulled up sharply and looked at one another as though acted upon by some mutual disturbance.
But not a sound broke the stillness save a remote murmuring, until a solitary sea gull rose in the air and circled directly over the tower, uttering its mournful and unmusical cry. Automatically to my mind sprang the lines of the poem:
Far from all brother-men, in the weird of the fen,
With God’s creatures I bide, ‘mid the birds that I ken;
Where the winds ever dree, where the hymn of the sea
Brings a message of peace from the ocean to me.