‘I wish to goodness you had done what your little friend in the yellow hat wanted you to do,’ said the commander of the sloop, late in the afternoon, with visible exasperation.

‘Do you, sir?’ answered Byrne, bitter with positive anguish. ‘I wonder what you would have said afterwards? Why! I might have been kicked out of the Service for looting a mule from a nation in alliance with His Majesty. Or I might have been battered to a pulp with flails and pitchforks—a pretty tale to go home about one of your officers—while trying to steal a mule. Or chased ignominiously to the boat—for you would not expect me to shoot unoffending people for the sake of a mangy mule.…And yet,’ he added in a low voice, ‘I almost wish myself I had done it.’

Before dark those two young men had worked themselves up into a highly complex psychological state of scornful scepticism and alarmed credulity. It tormented them exceedingly; and the thought that it would have to last for six days at least and possibly be prolonged further for an indefinite time was not to be borne. The ship was therefore put on the inshore tack^* at dark. All through the gusty night she went towards the land to look for her man, at times lying over^* in the heavy puffs, at others rolling idle in the swell, nearly stationary, as if she too had a mind of her own to swing perplexed between cool reason and warm impulse.

Then just at daybreak a boat put off from her and went on, tossed by the seas, towards the shallow cove, where, with considerable difficulty, a man in a thick coat and a round hat managed to land on a strip of shingle.

‘It was my wish,’ writes Mr Byrne, ‘a wish of which my captain approved, to land secretly if possible. I did not want to be seen either by my aggrieved friend in the yellow hat, whose motives were not clear, or by the one-eyed wine-seller, who may or may not have been affiliated to the devil, or indeed by any other dweller in that primitive village. But the cove was the only possible landing-place for miles; and from the steepness of the ravine I couldn’t make a circuit to avoid the houses.

‘Fortunately,’ he goes on, ‘all the people were yet in their beds. It was barely daylight when I found myself walking on the thick layer of sodden leaves filling the only street. No soul was stirring abroad, no dog barked. The silence was profound, and I had concluded with some wonder that apparently no dogs were kept in the hamlet, when I heard a low snarl, and from a noisome alley between two hovels emerged a vile cur with its tail between its legs. He slunk off silently, showing me his teeth as he ran ahead, and disappeared so suddenly that he might have been the unclean incarnation of the Evil One. There was, too, something so weird in the manner of his coming and vanishing, that my spirits, already by no means very high, became further depressed by the revolting sight of this creature, as if by an unlucky presage.’

Byrne got away from the coast unobserved as far as he knew, and then struggled manfully to the west against wind and rain, on a barren dark upland, under a sky of ashes. Far away the harsh and desolate mountains raising their scarped and denuded ridges seemed to wait for him menacingly. The evening found him fairly near to them, but, in sailor language, uncertain of his position, hungry, wet and tired out by a day of steady tramping over broken ground, during which he had seen very few people, and had been unable to obtain the slightest intelligence of Tom Corbin’s passage. ‘On! on! I must push on,’ he had been saying to himself through the hours of solitary effort, spurred more by an anxious feeling than by any definite fear or definite hope.

The lowering daylight died out quickly, leaving him faced by a broken bridge. He descended into the ravine, forded a narrow stream of rapid water by the last gleam, and clambering out on the other side was met by the night, which fell like a bandage over his eyes. The wind, sweeping in the darkness the broadside of the Sierra,^* worried his ears by a continuous roaring noise as of a maddened sea. He suspected that he had lost the road. Even in daylight, with its ruts and mud-holes and ledges of outcropping stone, it was difficult to distinguish from the dreary waste of the moor, interspersed with boulders and clumps of naked bushes. But as he says, ‘he steered his course by the feel of the wind,’ his hat rammed low on his brow, his head down, stopping now and again from mere weariness of mind rather than of