He turned a rambling eye on us, but showed no surprise.

“Blight him!  Blight him!  Blight him!” said the little old man.

“Blight him!  Blight him!  Blight him!” said I, deeming it well to fall in with his humour.

“Ay—­who?” he asked.

“The one you mean.”

“Ay,—­Blight him!  Blight him!  Blight him!” and he lifted a bottle from the ground between his knees, and took a pull at it, and passed it on to me.  I drank and passed it to Le Marchant, and the fiery spirit ran through my veins like new hot life.

“We are starving.  Give us to eat,” I said, and the old man pointed to a hole in the side of the hut.  I thrust in my hand and found bread, dark coloured and coarse, but amazingly sweet and strengthening, and a lump of fat bacon.  We divided it without a word, and ate like famished dogs.  And all the time the old man chaunted “Blight him!” with fervour, and drank every now and then from the bottle.  We drank too as we ate, but sparingly, lest our heads should go completely, though we could not believe such hospitality a trap.

It was a nightmare ending to a nightmare journey, but for the moment we had food and shelter and we asked no more.  When we had eaten we curled ourselves up on the floor and slept, with “Blight him!  Blight him!  Blight him!” dying in our ears.

I must have slept a long time, for when I woke I felt almost myself again.  I had dim remembrances of half-wakings, in which I had seen the old man still crouching over his smouldering fire muttering his usual curse.  But now he was gone, and Le Marchant and I had the place to ourselves, and presently Le Marchant stretched and yawned, and sat up blinking at the smoke.

“Where is the old one?” he asked.  “Or was he only a dream?”

“Real enough, and so was his bread and bacon.  I’m hungry again,” and we routed about for food, but found only a bottle with spirits in it, which we drank.

We sat there in the careless sloth that follows too great a strain, but feeling the strength grow as we sat.

“Is he safe?” asked Le Marchant at last.  “Or has he gone to bring the soldiers on us?  And is it night or day?” and he felt round with his foot till it came on the door and let in a bright gleam of daylight.

We crawled out into the sunshine and sat with our backs against the sods of the house, looking out over the great sweep of the flats.  It was like a sea whose tumbling waves had turned suddenly into earth and become fixed.  Here and there great green breakers stood up above the rest with bristling crests of wire grass, and the darker patches of tiny tangled shrubs and heather and the long black pools and ditches were like the shadows that dapple the sea.  The sky was almost as clear a blue as we get in Sercq, and was so full of singing larks that it set us thinking of home.

Away on the margin of the flats we saw the steeples of churches, and between us and them a small black object came flitting like a jumping beetle.  We sat and watched it, and it turned into a man, who overcame the black ditches, and picked his way from tussock to tussock, by means of a long pole, which brought him to us at length in a series of flying leaps.