Yet still he held on, though in truth he hardly knew any longer why he ran or what his need for haste, and as he came to the wood round a spur where a cluster of young beeches grew, he saw a tall, upright, elderly man walking there, well-dressed and of a neat, soldier-like appearance.

“Hallo—­there you are—­father—­” he gasped and fell down, prone unconscious.

CHAPTER XXVII

FLIGHT AND PURSUIT

When he came to himself he was lying on his back, and bending over him was his father’s familiar face, wearing an expression of great surprise and wonder, and still greater annoyance.

“What is the matter?” General Dunsmore asked as soon as he saw that his son’s senses were returning to him.  “Have you all gone mad together?  You send me a mysterious note to meet you here at three, you turn up racing and running like an escaped lunatic, and with a disgusting growth of hair all over your face, so that I didn’t know you till you spoke, and then there’s Walter dodging about in the wood here like a poacher hiding from the keepers.  Are you both quite mad, Rupert?”

“Walter,” Rupert repeated, lifting himself on one hand, “Walter —­have you seen him?”

“Over there,” said the general, nodding towards the right.  “He was dodging and creeping about for all the world like some poaching rascal.  I waved, but he didn’t see me, and when I tried to overtake him I lost sight of him somehow in the trees, and found I had come right out of my way for Brook Bourne Spring.”

“Thank God for that,” said Rupert fervently as a picture presented itself to him of his unsuspecting father trying in that lonely wood to find and overtake the man whose murderous purpose was aimed at his life.

“What do you mean?” snapped the general.  “And why have you made such a spectacle of yourself with all that beard?  Why, I didn’t know you till you spoke—­there’s Walter there.  What makes him look like that?”

For Walter had just come out of the wood about fifty yards to their right, and when he saw them talking together he understood at once that in some way or another all his plans had failed.

He was looking at them through a gap in some undergrowth that hid most of his body, but showed his head and shoulders plainly, and as he stood there watching them his face was like a fiend’s.

“Walter,” the general shouted, and to his son Rupert he said:  “The boy’s ill.”

Walter moved forward from among the trees.  He had a gun in his hand, and he flung it forward as though preparing to fire, and at the same moment Rupert Dunsmore drew from his pocket the pistol Deede Dawson had given him and fired himself.

But at the very moment that he pulled the trigger the general struck up his arm so that the bullet flew high and harmless through the tops of the trees.

Walter stepped back again into the wood, and Rupert said: