And it happened in that way that Captain Neeland of the 6th Battalion, Athabasca Regiment, Canadian Overseas Contingent, found himself in the Forest of Aulnes, with instructions to stay there long enough to verify or discredit a disturbing report which had just arrived by mail. The report was so strange and the investigation required so much secrecy and caution that Captain Neeland changed his uniform for knickerbockers and shooting coat, borrowed a fowling piece and a sack of cartridges loaded with No. 4 shot, tucked his gun under his arm, and sauntered out of Lorient town before dawn, like any other duck-hunting enthusiast. Several reasons influenced his superiors in sending Neeland to investigate this latest and oddest report: for one thing, although he had become temporarily a Canadian for military purposes only, in reality he was an American artist who, like scores and scores of his artistic fellow Yankees, had spent many years industriously painting those sentimental Breton scenes which obsess our painters, if not their critics. He was a very bad painter, but he did not know it; he had already become a promising soldier, but he did not realize that either. As a sportsman, however, Neeland was rather pleased with himself. He was sent because he knew the sombre and lovely land of Finistère pretty well, because he was more or less of a naturalist and a sportsman, and because the plan which he had immediately proposed appeared to be reasonable as well as original. It had been a stiff walk across country--fifteen miles, as against thirty odd around by road--but neither cart nor motor was to enter into the affair. If anybody should watch him, he was only a duckhunter afield, crossing the marshes, skirting _étangs_, a solitary figure in the waste, easily reconcilable with his wide and melancholy surroundings. CHAPTER IX L’OMBRE Aulnes Woods were brown and still under their unshed canopy of October leaves. Against a grey, transparent sky the oaks and beeches towered, unstirred by any wind; in the subdued light among the trees, ferns, startlingly green, spread delicate plumed fronds; there was no sound except the soft crash of his own footsteps through shriveling patches of brake; no movement save when a yellow leaf fluttered down from above or one of those little silvery grey moths took wing and fluttered aimlessly along the forest aisle, only to alight upon some lichen-spotted tree and cling there, slowly waving its delicate, translucent wings. It was a very ancient wood, the Forest of Aulnes, and the old trees were long past timber value. Even those gleaners of dead wood and fallen branches seemed to have passed a different way, for the forest floor was littered with material that seldom goes to waste in Europe, and which broke under foot with a dull, thick sound, filling the nostrils with the acrid odour of decay.