nest.  But that dark mountain mass changed my outlook.  I began to have a queer instinct that that was the place, that something might be concealed there, something pretty damnable.  I remember I sat on a top for half an hour raking the hills with my glasses.  I made out ugly precipices, and glens which lost themselves in primeval blackness.  When the sun caught them—­for it was a gleamy day—­it brought out no colours, only degrees of shade.  No mountains I had ever seen—­not the Drakensberg or the red kopjes of Damaraland or the cold, white peaks around Erzerum—­ever looked so unearthly and uncanny.

Oddly enough, too, the sight of them set me thinking about Ivery.  There seemed no link between a smooth, sedentary being, dwelling in villas and lecture-rooms, and that shaggy tangle of precipices.  But I felt there was, for I had begun to realize the bigness of my opponent.  Blenkiron had said that he spun his web wide.  That was intelligible enough among the half-baked youth of Biggleswick, and the pacifist societies, or even the toughs on the Clyde.  I could fit him in all right to that picture.  But that he should be playing his game among those mysterious black crags seemed to make him bigger and more desperate, altogether a different kind of proposition.  I didn’t exactly dislike the idea, for my objection to 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.