“Very well,” said Dale, “so be it.  That’s the idea.  All right.  I agree.”

He did not, however, move for another minute or so.  He was thinking hard, and listening eagerly.  But he could hear no sound, could imagine no sound, other than that made by the wind.

Then he moved, and, examining the ground, made his way slowly from the ride to the rocks, thinking the while, “It’s impossible to follow my exact footsteps, because things have changed—­but this was about the line I took with him.”

Forcing himself through a tangle of holly and hawthorn, he came out into the open space and his feet struck against stone.  In front of him the rocks rose darkly against the waning light, and he began to clamber about among them, over smooth round surfaces, along narrow gullies, and by cruel jagged ridges, seeking to find the exact spot where he had left the dead body.  “It was about here,” he said, after a time.  “It was close by here.  Prob’bly down there, where the foxgloves and the blackberries have taken root.  Anyhow, that’s near enough.  I’ve come as near as I can;” and he sat down upon the ledge just above this hollow, and looked about him, attentively, in all directions.

The wind had ceased to blow; not a leaf stirred; silence reigned over the strewn boulders.  Downward, where the ground fell away to a deep chasm, everything was indistinct; to the west, beneath banked masses of cloud, the last glow of the sunset showed in blood-red bands, and on this side all the intervening trees were black as ink; all about him the shadows filled every hollow, and the rocks were like shoals or reefs above the surface of a stagnant sea.

The place was a wilderness, a solitude, the dead and barren landscape of dreams—­quite empty, unoccupied, a place that even ghosts would shun.  He sat thinking, and listening; and soon it occurred to him that, though all seemed so dead and so silent, this place was really full of life.  He heard the faint buzz of belated bees questing in tufts of heather or foxglove bells, a bat flitted over his head, some small furred thing scuttled past his feet; and in the air there were thousands of winged insects, whose tiny voices one could hear by straining one’s ears.  Listening intently for such murmurs, he thought:  “Perhaps really and truly one has not any right to kill the smallest of these gnats.  All that stuff about self-protection, an’ struggle for existence, is just fiddle-de-dee in so far’s God’s concerned.  He never meant it, an’ never will approve of it.  It’s just nature’s hatefulness and cruelty—­not permitted or intended, an’ to be put right some day.”

It grew darker and darker, and the shadows rose all round him till he was like a man who had climbed out of the gray sea upon the only rock that was not yet submerged.  When he got up presently and looked down at the hollow where he believed the corpse had lain, he could no longer see it.  It was gone, lost in shadow.