For a second he stopped, and then he was back
round the corner, and had swung himself up to a patch of shadow on the
crag-side. He looked down and saw his enemy clearly in the moonlight; a
long, ferret-faced fellow, with a rifle hung on his back and an ugly
crooked knife in his hand. The man looked round, sniffing the air like
a stag, and then, satisfied that there was nothing to fear, turned and
went on. Lewis, who had been sitting on a sharp jag of rock, swung an
aching body to the ground and advanced circumspectly.
In an hour or two he came to the top of the slope and the beginning of
the second tableland. A grey dimness was taking the place of the dark,
and it had suddenly grown bitterly cold. Dawn in such high latitudes is
not a thing of violent changes, but of slow and subtle gradations of
light, of sudden, coy flushes of colour, of thin winds and bright
fleeting hazes. He lay for a minute in the scrub of cloud-berries, the
collar of his coat buttoned round his throat, and the morning wind,
fresh from leagues of snow, blowing chill on his face. Behind was the
slope alive with men who at any moment might emerge on the plateau. He
waited for the sight of a figure, but none came; clearly the muster was
not yet complete. A thought grew in his brain, and a sudden clearness
in the air translated it into action; for in the hazy distance across
the tableland he saw the walls of Forza fort.
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