“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 unfortunately 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 before me, and he 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 its 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.”

He got away from the coast unobserved, as far as he knew, 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 incertitude 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 by the last gleam of rapid water, and clambering out on the other side was met by the night which fen 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 body—­as if not his strength but his resolution were being overtaxed by the strain of endeavour half suspected to be vain, and by the unrest of his feelings.