HOUNDS PASTURE

Otago Witness, Issue 3764, 4 May 1926, Page 5

HOUNDS PASTURE

By

Vincent Cornier.

t |( Copmigiit.—Fob the Witness.).

SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS CHAPTERS. Thorroldan Priory. a grim old house at the edge of the North Yorkshire moors is the centre of a grim and 'baffling mystery. A hound howls; a stranger arrives. This man, Magerison, takes up his quarters in the place. He has some hold over Thorrold, the master of the Priory. He presumes on this to tell Dorothy Thorrold, the old man s grand-daughter, that he intends to make her his wife. Margerison proves, and forces Thorrold to admit, that John Barnaby, who has worked as a servant in the Priory, is in reality the next heir, and Dorothy’s brother. Looking for the hound Barnaby is shot in the shoulder by someone hiding in Hound’s Pasture, a field in which a treasure, hidden by monks, is said to be buried. The wound turns out to have been caused by a diamond, not a bullet I A duck shot in Hound’s Pasture has its crop filled with gems worth two thousand pounds. While examining them Magerison is attacked—by a ghostly monk, says Dorothy, who saw the thing “materialise’ behind him. He is knocked unconscious, and the jewels are stolen. Dorothy now betrays her love for him. Together they resolve to solve the mystery. No one is found in the locked room in which the attack was made, but while searching a spectral figure of a monk is seen. Magerison fires at it, but it is not harmed I Dorothy accidentally grips a carved boss of oak, and she and Magerison fall together through a secret aperture in the wall. Old Thorrold bursts open the study door, and Igod, his confidential servant, and he quarrel. Igod accuses his master of being—a murderer 1 Meanwhile Magerison and Dorothy Thorroid explore the place into which they fell ou the opening of the secret panel. They find themselves in a deserted lead mine gallery beneath the Priory. Igod and Thorxold, baffled by the pair’s disappearance, decide to join forces. While they are talking Richard Leathley, Thorrold’s enemy, suddenly appears—seemly from nowhere! Old Igod, the master of Thorroldan, and Leathley confer; Ledtliley traps himself—informing the two autocrats of the priory that he to-at'their mercy. Meanwhile Margerison and Dorothy are busily exploring under the priory, in the old lead mines. CHAPTER XVIII.—IN THE : i: TUNNEL. Before Magerison’s fesr-laden eyes the mouth of the gallery loomed, a fearsome thing. He laughed, but it was a mirthless and hollow sound. “You are afraid?” that was Dorothy’s cool question. “I—l confess that I am, Dorothy,” and again be laughed. She looked at him puzzled. She did not like that laugh, nor yet could she understand it. There seemed to be no occasion for merriment of any kind. . . . she had not known the battlefields of Flanders and the incessant cluttering sounds, like laughter, that left men’s thmats as they passed death on their orderly ways to death. . . . “Won’t you stay behind little woman and—let me do whatever exploration there is to be done?” ‘l’ve told you once before,” her voice was as steady as the rocks about them, “that—‘whither thou goest thither will I go,’. . . lead on Mac Duff!” Her trifling attempt to add flippancy to the sentence of a deadly purpose fell as flatlv on his sense as did his laughter on hers. Silently now, they entered the tunnel. The _ monks had made that road. That Magerison knew by the soft tread of it to his feet. It was paved deeply with tan and peat fibre, and was as soft resilient* as rubber, and as silent to his hurrying steps, and, to hers. For they both pressed forward quickly. The same instinct held them both in bondage. Each feared for the ultimate outcome of th,eir essay into the earthy bowels beneath the priory: in a lesser degree each feared the extinction of the light Magerison carried. , .* Already it was burning yellowly. Thev feared then, the darkness. . . . the deathly, all-enveloping darkness. Past towering pillars of native spar, scintillant and wondrously beautiful in the topaz rays of the electric torch: under high archways of tinder-dry oak and through long galleries of “shoring works” executed in iron-hand teakwood they vynt for nearly three quarters of a mile. Now -r-according to Magerison’s happil*’ made calculations from his watch and the pocket compass he carried—they were centred be. neath the surface of Hound’s Pasture. He said as much, excitedly, to Dorothv. “Are you sure?” came her whispered querv. “Certain! We’ve travelled due west for twenty minutes, and. on surface, that would have taken us directly from your grandfather’s study windows to Hound’s Pasture. . . Can you doubt that the came direction, pursued beneath the earth, doesn’t amount to much the same tiling?” She answered, “Thrilling, isn’t it? Why, we might even find the—the treasure!” “You believe then. Dorothy, that it is beneath the pasture?” “I'm as certain of that as vou are of your bearings, my dear!” “Then, there must he a wav out from these galleries to the open air.” “How do you make that out ?” “Well,” — slowly —“admitting your premises as being sound, and I have no reason to doubt them, then the fact of the ducks being able to pick up odd jewels from that treasure proves conclusively that not only are they able to gain access to the outfall of these galleries in the open air, hut that the treasure itself lies very near to that i [oUow.'V

“You ought to, Dorothy—bred and born on the marshlands of this district as you have been!” There was a touch of fretfulness and impatience in his voice. “Have you ever known of a wildfowl entering, for example, a cave?” She considered. “No, I cannot say that I have,” she slowly made reply. “Very well then—take that as proving that wildfowl in general, and ducks in particular I may say, will not enter any space overhung by a roof. Then it follows ducks would not fly into the open-air end of this gallery, however large it may be —no, not even to sate their appetite for glittering stones. They hate anything in the nature of a passage way or an alley of any kind—probably their instinctive fear of a decoy breeds in them that aversion. . . . “Then, I argue, the mouth of this tunnel, opening somewhere in or about Hound’s Pasture, is nothing more' or less than a rift in the earth—a tiny cleft through which water is always pouring.” “Water always pouring?” She echoed the words, bewildered. “Why that?” “You know how ducks favour the source of a stream—no matter what its size—that opens on the shore?” “Y-yes, I do.” “Righto. The reason the birds like such surroundings lies in the fact that the * feed ’ they obtain there is always the freshest, and, what is vastly more important in our case, the pebbles washed by the rushing stream at the point it bursts from earth are always the smallest and the most symmetrical. you grasp what I am driving “Yes,” excitedly she answered, her eyes shining and her fingers tightly entwined. “1 follow you! You are seeking to prove that whatever water gets in these old workings converges and drains out at one small point—pours out with some pressure—at that point, outside, in Hound’s Pasture. And jewels, washed down from the hoard of treasure, get caught among the tiny pebbles, and the ducks pick them out because they like their colour, shape, and hardness To help grind their food,” he finished grinning. “ Go up one, Dorothy. By Jove, you’re quite a good scholar, after all! ” CHAPTER XIX.—THE DEATH CHAMBER. There followed a silence. Dorothy was more excited than she cared to admit. Magerison was preternaturally calm at first, with the all-pervading dread of moving in company with the woman he loved amid the dangers of subterranean and ancient ways; secondly, because some psychic inner sense was forewarning him of something impending greater in its danger than anything physical could be. It came when—the torch went out. The battery had given up its last reserves; the tiny globe was dull. Dorothy screamed and clutched at her lover’s arm with her two coldly clawing hands. He patted her fingers reassuringly. “It’s all right,” he muttered; “it’s—it’s all right—quite all right. I’ve got some matches . . . we’re not lost, and ” Then the whisper grew beneath the earth. At first a sound as of a tiny wind rustling among distant trees in the silences precedent to storm ... a little wind; an insistent wind. Then from the movement as of air it grew in its insistence up to a point of volume in which could be recognised the sullen monotone of a voice secretive to itself in the night; as of the grumbling hoarse and meaningless communion of a madman’s thoughts to his own ears. • . . A hellish sound was this. Magerison felt his skin growing tight and cold, and knew that lie was trembling like a scared girl. For all that lie tried by pressure of liis hands on hers to comfort Dorothy. She, after the manner of women played her part as women have since world began. What time he trembled, she was steady; as lie feared—so she grew unafraid now, as he vented his feelings in muttered profanities . , . she closed her eyes and prayed. And so the sound came up from a rustle of moving air to a whisper, and from a whisper to a muttering . . . and, it drew nearer . . . until now it went past as on the cresting waves of flame; a hollowly roaring diapason, as that heard when an old house, greatly timbered, is given up in fire to destruction. Magerison was crashed hack to the wall; Dorothy Thorrold crouched beside him % . • and all suddenly was still. A patter of feet and a scuttering on the tan—a dog—a hound, beastly of outline, fearsome, fantastic even . . . terrible. This was the Death Hound of tho Thorrold’s that ran past. Although there was not light yet the ghostly thing could be seen. . • it loped past like a wolf on its’grim occa-

sious of hunting, and was lost to sight along the passage—a lambent thing it was; a form of horror. Magerison gave tongue like a hound himself. Grabbing Dorothy by her wrist, he started off on its track. And now was proved what dangers he had feared when first he came to the Priory and flung the dead wild duck on Thorrold’s study table. He was armed—heavily armed. His gun he had left behind him in the study; now he produced a heavy Colt automatic pistol. Once, twice, thrice he fired. The bitter puce flames of the thunderous discharges lit the stone with eerie light . . . but still the hound went on. As with the spectral monk in the study, so with the death hound • • . missiles could not harm either, or so it seemed. Still the two ran on, inflamed now with some mad, hunting lust—not atrophied by fear. Then the hound was not; it disappeared in a flash—to leave the pair who hunted it baffled in darkness. Now the passage was terminated. Magerison crashed into a wall of stone and fell. Dorothy Thorrold stumbled into him and almost fell as well. And as Magerison lay on the peat floor he saw a gleam of silvery-blue light above him . . . moonlight! They had found the outlet, at last, to the point in Hound’s Pasture from which the wild ducks took tlie gems they seemed so keen on swallowing. “There—there’s the outfall, Dorothy,” he yelled, ghostly monk and phantom hound and roaring wind forgotten on an instant. “Can’t you see it? Bend down, get your head to my level, and then look up. The outlet I tell you—the outlet! ” “But Dorothy Thorrold did not answer. No more did she follow his directions. She was standing—could he but have seen her—reeling and twisting in the oncoming vertigo of a great amazement. “You—you said you—had matches, Basil,” she murmured at last. “Then—strike one . . .” “Strike one? What for?” “Never mind—strike one!” He took out a wax vesta and scratched it. And in its yellow aureole of flame they saw a chamber before them, rough hewn in stone, furnished with a table and a chair. At the chair sat a man . . . about the chair lay scattered a horde of flashing stones—and parchments—and books—and ancient brassbound vellum rods. And the man at the table was dressed in the fashions of a previous age , 9 . and he was dead—long dead , . . and his waxen face was that of Thorrold, the master of Thorroldan, in the Wapentak of Thewle, in Yorkshire —the.man who, when last the two had seen him, was hearty, full-blooded, and evilly alive!

(To be continued.)