“Bill! do you padderowl round the wood, and keep a sharp look out that she don’t bolt without your seeing her. I’ll follow arter her here, and try if I can’t lay my hands on her; and if I do but chance to light on her, be she witch or devil, I’ll drag her out of her covert by the scruff of the neck.”
Morag heard no more than this.—She pressed forward towards the bed of the rill, and having reached it, she stopped, like a chased doe, one moment to listen, and hearing that the curses, as well as the crashing of the jack-boots of her pursuer, as yet indicated that he was still at some distance behind her, and evidently much entangled in his progress, she carefully shed the pendulous plants of the ferns asunder, and then slid herself gently down into the hollow channel. There finding her feet safely planted on the bottom, she cautiously and silently groped her way along the downward course of the rill, through the dark and confined passage which it had worn out for its tiny stream. In this way she soon came to the lower edge of the wood, where the hollow channel became deeper, and where it assumed more of the character of a ravine, but where it was still skirted with occasional oaks, mingled with thickets of birches, hazels, and furze bushes.
Morag was about to emerge from the obscurity of this subterranean arch, into the more open light, when, as she looked out, she beheld the mounted trooper standing on his stirrups on the top of the bank, eagerly gazing around him in all directions. The furze there grew too thick and high for him to be able to force his way down to the bottom of the ravine, even if he had accidently observed her. But his eyes were directed to higher and more distant objects, and seeing that she had been as yet unperceived, she instantly drew so far back, as to be beyond all reach of his observation,—whilst she could perfectly well watch him, so long as he maintained his present position. She listened for the crashing strides of him who was engaged in searching the wood for her. For a time they came faint and distant to her ear, but, by degrees, they began to come nearer,—and then again the sound would alternately diminish and increase, as he turned away in some other direction, fighting through the opposing boughs, and then came beating his way back again, in the same manner, with many a round oath. At length she heard him raging forward in the direction of the rill, at some forty yards above the place where she was, blaspheming as he went.
“Ten thousand devils!” cried he; “such a place as this I never se’ed in all my life afore. If my heyes beant nearly whipt out of my head with them ’ere blasted broom shafts, my name aint Tom Wetherby! Dang it, there again! that whip has peeled the very skin off my cheek, and made both my heyes run over with water like mill-sluices—I wonder at all where this she-devil can be hidden? Curse her! Do you think, Bill, that she can raaly have ridden off through the hair, as they do say they do? But for a matter of that, she may be here somewhere after all, for my heyes be so dimmed, that, dang me an’ I could see her if she were to rise up afore my very face. How they do smart with pain! Oh! Lord, where am I going?” cried he, as he went smack down through the ferns and brush into the concealed bed of the rill, and was laid prostrate on his back in the narrow clayey bottom of it, in such a position that it defied him to rise.
“Hollo Bill!” cried he, from the bowels of the earth, in a voice which reached his comrade as if he had spoken with a pillow on his mouth, but which rang with terrible distinctness down the hollow natural tube to the spot where Morag was concealed. “Hollo!—help!—help!”
“What a murrain is the matter with ye?” cried Bill, very much astonished.
“I’ve fallen plump into the witches’ den!—into the very bottomless pit!—Hollo!—hollo! Help!—help!” cried the fallen trooper from the abyss.
“How the plague am I to get to ye if so be the pit be bottomless?” cried Bill, in a drawling tone, that did not argue much promise of any zealous exertion of effective aid on the part of the speaker.
“Curse ye, come along quickly, or I shall be smothered in this here infernal, dark, outlandish place,” cried Tom Wetherby.
“Well,—well,” replied Bill, with the same long-drawn tone of philosophic indifference, “I’m a coming—I’m a coming. But you must keep chaunting out from the bottom of that bottomless pit of yours, do you hear, Tom, else I shall never find you in that ’ere wilderness. And how the devil I am to get into it is more than I know.”