He listened, straining his ears, alert, intent upon the sounds he ought to recognize--the sounds he knew so well. Only the ceaseless pounding of the sea assailed his ears. Three wild duck, widgeon, came speeding through the fog; he breasted the wind, balanced heavily on both crutches and one leg, and shoved his gun upward. At the same instant the mist in front and overhead became noisy with wild fowl, rising in one great, panic-stricken, clamoring cloud. He hesitated; a muffled, thudding sound came to him over the unseen sea, growing louder, nearer, dominating the gale, increasing to a rattling clatter. Suddenly a great cloudy shape loomed up through the whirling mist ahead--an enormous shadow in the fog--a gigantic spectre rushing inland on vast and ghostly pinions. As the man shrank on his crutches, looking up, the aëroplane swept past overhead--a wounded, wavering, unsteady, unbalanced thing, its right aileron dangling, half stripped, and almost mangled to a skeleton. Already it was slanting lower toward the forest like a hard-hit duck, wing-crippled, fighting desperately for flight-power to the very end. Then the inland mist engulfed it. And after it hobbled Wayland, painfully, two brace of dead ducks and his slung fowling piece bobbing on his back, his rubber-shod crutches groping and probing among drenched rocks and gullies full of kelp, his left leg in splints hanging heavily. He could not go fast; he could not go very far. Further inland, foggy gorse gave place to broom and blighted bracken, all wet, sagging with rain. Then he crossed a swale of brown reeds and tussock set with little pools of water, opaque and grey in the rain. Where the outer moors narrowed he turned westward; then a strip of low, thorn-clad cliff confronted him, up which he toiled along a V-shaped cleft choked with ferns. The spectral forest of Läis lay just beyond, its wind-tortured branches tossing under a leaden sky. East and west lonely moors stretched away into the depths of the mist; southward spread the sea; to the north lay the wide woods of Läis, equally deserted now in this sad and empty land. He hobbled to the edge of the forest and stood knee deep in discoloured ferns, listening. The sombre beech-woods spread thick on either hand, a wilderness of crossed limbs and meshed branches to which still clung great clots of dull brown leaves. He listened, peering into sinister, grey depths. In the uncertain light nothing stirred except the clashing branches overhead; there was no sound except the wind’s flowing roar and the ghostly noise of his own voice, hallooing through the solitude--a voice in the misty void that seemed to carry less sound than the straining cry of a sleeper in his dreams. If the aëroplane had landed, there was no sign here. How far had it struggled on, sheering the tree-tops, before it fell?--if indeed it had fallen somewhere in the wood’s grey depths?