The night was long—unreasonably long—Ernest thought. Sufficiently lonely as well. There were no wild beasts, or robbers, likely to be ’round’; still there was an ‘eerie’ feeling about the still, solemn, soundless night. The rare cry of a night-bird, the occasional rustling made by the smaller denizens of the forest, the soft murmuring of the pine-tree nigh which he had elected to camp—these were all his experiences until the stars paled and the dawn wind moaned fretfully, like a dreaming infant. Having no culinary duties to delay him, Ernest saddled up his good gray steed, roused the unwilling sheep, and started forth, ready to do battle with fate in the coming day. Alas! he struck no defined trail. He hit off no leading thoroughfare. At first mid-day, and again the dewy eve, which might have been so described if the autumn rain had come—which it had not—again found Mr. Neuchamp a wanderer upon the face of the earth and no nearer home. As for the sheep, they found sustenance without difficulty, as they ‘nibbled away both night and day,’ all heedless of the morrow, or Mr. Neuchamp’s anxious brain and empty stomach. They apparently had no objection to camp at the deserted out-station, which had so bitterly disappointed Ernest when he reached it at the close of the day. By this time, in addition to being unmistakably and importunately hungry, Mr. Neuchamp was furiously thirsty. His satisfaction was great, therefore, when he discovered, just outside the door of the empty hut, two hogsheads filled with clean water. He was about to plunge his head into the nearer one, like an eager horse, when a sudden thought passed through his brain, and he stopped short, with desire and dread written in every line of his face. What was the potent thought, the word of power, that sufficed to arrest the step as if a precipice had opened suddenly below his feet to hold back the longing lips so parched and moistureless? One word, lightning-like, flashed along the wondrous telegraph of the brain. That word was ‘arsenic’! Ernest looked again at the casks. The water was suspiciously clear. He could not trust it. He knew that somewhere in that direction Mr. Doubletides had been dressing the feet of lame sheep with a solution of arsenic. He had seen in the local paper an account of a thirsty shepherd and his horse similarly placed. The horse drank out of one cask, the man from the other. The horse died. Ernest was not sufficiently tired of his life to take a philosophical view of the chances. Sudden death, undignified convulsions, a visit from the coroner—an unsympathetic individual, who declined minute shades of discrimination in favour of ’three star’—‘Verdict, found dead, as much arsenic internally placed as would have killed a horse.’ All this was uninviting, non-heroic. Bordering on the heroic, however, was the stern resolve to pass the night without tasting one drop of the doubtfully limpid element. CHAPTER XII