my past weeks had been that I was out of my proper job, and this
was more my line of country. I always felt that I was a better bandit
than a detective. But a sort of awe mingled with my satisfaction. I
began to feel about Ivery as I had felt about the three devils of the
Black Stone who had hunted me before the war, and as I never felt
about any other Hun. The men we fought at the Front and the men
I had run across in the Greenmantle business, even old Stumm
himself, had been human miscreants. They were formidable enough,
but you could gauge and calculate their capacities. But this Ivery
was like a poison gas that hung in the air and got into unexpected
crannies and that you couldn't fight in an upstanding way. Till
then, in spite of Blenkiron's solemnity, I had regarded him simply
as a problem. But now he seemed an intimate and omnipresent
enemy, intangible, too, as the horror of a haunted house. Up on
that sunny hillside, with the sea winds round me and the whaups
calling, I got a chill in my spine when I thought of him.

I am ashamed to confess it, but I was also horribly hungry.
There was something about the war that made me ravenous, and
the less chance of food the worse I felt. If I had been in London
with twenty restaurants open to me, I should as likely as not have
gone off my feed. That was the cussedness of my stomach. I had
still a little chocolate left, and I ate the fisherman's buttered scones
for luncheon, but long before the evening my thoughts were dwelling
on my empty interior.

I put up that night in a shepherd's cottage miles from anywhere.
The man was called Macmorran, and he had come from Galloway
when sheep were booming. He was a very good imitation of a
savage, a little fellow with red hair and red eyes, who might have