He nodded slowly, and looking very serious took me by the hand, and together we crawled away. It didn't seem in the least fantastic to me, for it had happened often before. It was indeed part of our game, for our hide-and-seek was no garden affair; we needed the whole of England for our playground. So once more we set out on our travels; and I didn't question how it was that everything was ready and in order, our cloaks being hidden in a bush near by, and my father's knapsack packed for the journey. But on this occasion there was a difference, and it was probably this difference that stamped the affair on my mind. For usually we managed to cover our tracks after a day or two, but this time our pursuer seemed unusually tenacious of the scent, and for days we fled, doubling upon our path, plunging into woods, emerging at high roads where we obtained a lift on a passing cart or waggon, hiding for a day in a remote hamlet, burrowing through the twisting streets of a city, till at last it seemed to me that my whole life had been one long wandering, and I began to grow tired. It needed all my father's fun and exhaustless imagination to keep my heart tuned to the wearying adventure. On the night I speak of I remember I was crying with fatigue and cold and hunger, dragging at my father's hand as he plodded me remorselessly onward down a drenched and dripping woodland path. His buoyant laugh, usually so exhilarating, failed to shake my drooping spirits into cheerfulness, for indeed I was bitterly miserable. My feet were numbed to solid lumps of aching cold, and the wet twigs that wisped across my face hurt cruelly. Even the hand that my father held was bitter with a throbbing half-consciousness of animation, and the other hung nerveless at my side. So I whimpered and toddled on. But I remember feeling no unkindness towards my father. Not for a moment did my heart cry blame on him; for babe as I was he had successfully impressed me with the sense of strange pursuit that ever hung upon our flight. It was something entirely beyond his power, something big like fate or death. Tired and miserable, I knew I must on, for behind us there were creatures of the dark scenting stealthily upon our track. I heard their sniffing through the pauses of the wind, and more terrible still their laughter, cackling brutally in our wake. This made me quicken my pace, though it was pain to do so, and clutch my father's hand more tightly in both my own. "Shadow-of-Fear?" I would say. "Yes, Tommy, yes," he would answer. "But he's lost the trail this time." Shadow-of-Fear was the name my father had given to our secret and inexorable enemy.