flashed like fire through the pit: "Tyrant!--Fool to go."

From a long immersion deeper in the pit he struggled frantically. He must
get out. Somehow he must find wings. He realized that his eyes were
closed. He tried to open them and failed. So the pit persisted and he
surrendered himself, as one accepts death, to its hateful blackness.

Abruptly he experienced a momentary release. There was no more swaying,
no more movement of any kind. He heard a strange, melancholy voice,
whispering without words, always whispering with a futile perseverance as
if it wished him to understand something it could not express.

"What is it trying to tell me?" he asked himself.

Then he understood. It was the voice of the wind, and it tried to tell
him to open his eyes, and he found that he could. But in spite of his
desire they closed again almost immediately. Yet, from that swift
glimpse, a picture outlined itself later in his memory.

In the midst of wild, rolling clouds, the moon was a drowning face.
Stunted trees bent before the wind like puny men who strained impotently
to advance. Over there was one more like a real man--a figure, Bobby
thought, with a black thing over its face--a mask.

"This is the forest near the Cedars," Bobby said to himself. "I've come
to face the old devil after all."

He heard his own voice, harsh, remote, unnatural, speaking to the dim
figure with a black mask that waited half hidden by the straining trees.