Meantime he floundered stupidly among the trees. The path was not often used, and the undergrowth had become tangled across it—branches of ash and hazel whipped his cheeks, and brambles caught his feet and sent him stumbling. Once he fell full length, with the soft suck of mud under his body, and once he had to stop and fight for his breath which had been knocked out of him by the low bough of an oak. It was very dark in Goatsluck Wood—like a dark dream. He looked up and saw shuddering patches of sky, and they intensified the strange dream spell, for he seemed to be moving through them, tossed by the wind and scorched by whirling stars.
Then suddenly a meadow swam towards him—another meadow full of buttercups, all gleaming faintly in the marriage of twilight and moonlight that revelled over the fields. A soft wind baffed him, and cooled his lips with little drops of rain. He pounded on through the buttercups, thought and self-consciousness both almost swallowed up in the abnormal consciousness of environment that accompanies certain states of fever. He saw the moon hanging low and yellow in the east, he saw long, tangled hedges, and tufts of wood—and all round him, in meadow after meadow, that ceaseless shimmer of buttercups, as the wind puffed through them and bowed them to the moon.
Then suddenly he saw Quentin Lowe. His pace had slackened, for he had not seen Furlonger for some minutes, but the next moment he looked over his shoulder and hurried on again.
"Stop!" cried Leonard.
The figure hunched itself against the wind and plunged on.
"Stop!" gasped Len, and calling up all his strength broke into a run.
Quentin looked back, and saw that he was running. He himself was too proud to run, but he doubled against the hedge, and changing his direction, walked towards Langerish, so that Len nearly overran him.
But just in time he saw the short, heavy figure groping along the rim of the buttercups, and the chase took a southward direction.
Len had not the breath to run far—he wondered vaguely what had winded him. He came panting after Quentin, always the same distance behind; he no longer cried "Stop!"—just padded gasping after him.
They skirted the meadow known as Watch Oak, then followed the grass lane to Golden Pot and the outhouses of Anstiel. Quentin was trying to work his way back towards Kent and the valley of the hammer ponds, but Leonard drove him obstinately southwards. He was beginning to gain on him a little. Quentin could hear his footsteps, and he knew why he was following him.