“Either that we lost the way in the darkness or that they can’t be bothered with catching us. What I think is that if we find our way to the high road we’ll walk into more of the gang, and if we are lost in the mountains, as we may be, we don’t count. I was lost in quite civilised woods in northern Connecticut once, for a day and a night. This may not be funny before we’re through. There won’t be any friendly neighbors to come out looking for us. That get-away was too easy.”
“Don’t be so gloomy,” I said, “being lost is probably our only hope of getting away. We can steer south-west by the stars.”
“That’s all very well to suggest,” John said, “but there is a lot of rough going around here, and while we twist north and east and all the ways between to get around gullies and boulders, who is going to tell us we are really going south-west? I tried that steering by the stars business in Connecticut and it’ll be the same sort of thing here only worse.”
“You think we should try to find the high road, then?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “I don’t think it’s going to matter much what we try to find. It’s going to be entirely a matter of luck—good luck or bad luck. What I chiefly hope is that there aren’t any more Fakat Zols working on their own around here.”
I told him I thought that very unlikely, because one strong bandit would clean up all the little ones in short order, and he agreed. “Let’s just keep on down this slope,” he said. “At least it’s down hill, and south. We’ll undoubtedly have to climb up again before we’re through, and twist around a lot, but we may come out.”
It was a nightmare journey. At every slightest sound we stopped to listen. The hillside was smooth enough so that in spite of the darkness we had little difficulty keeping on it, but there were a thousand noises in the night that brought us up short to listen again.
We must have walked for more than an hour, when at last a pale gleam on the highest branches of some trees told us that the moon was up. Suddenly we heard unmistakable footsteps, and a beam of light from an electric torch showed us a path, sloping downward, directly ahead of us. John and I hid as well as we could behind the trees. Unfortunately our cover was poor. They were pines and sparse, with little underbrush, but the night was dark, and by crouching low we hoped to escape notice. The steps approached, there was no attempt at concealment, so we judged that the person approaching must be one of the Black Ghost’s men. The light flashed again on the path, nearer, in a wide sweep, blinding to us, who had been in darkness so long. We waited without moving.