At first he could hear nothing; then his ears detected a sound, and his nerves thrilled. As the other had said, it was something moving, and instinctively he realised that it was something heavier, more formidable than any of the light-footed denizens of an English wood. Somehow his mind reverted to the grim legend. What if it were true, and the strangled man actually did walk, with all the marks of his horrible and violent death upon him? In front, where the rides of the wood intersected each other, the moonlight streamed through in a broad patch, rendering blacker still the pitchy blackness beneath the trees beyond. The stillness and excitement, together with the gruesome associations of the place, had got upon their nerves even more than they knew. What if some awful apparition--appalling, horrible beyond words--were to emerge from yonder blackness, to stand forth in the ghostly moonlight, and petrify them with the unimaginable terrors of a visitant from beyond the grave? Haviland's pulses seemed to stand still as the sounds drew nearer and nearer. A keeper's? No. They were too quick, too heavy, too blundering, somehow. Then Anthony breathed one word: "Dog!" A dog! Of course, that solved the mystery. But even then the jump from supernatural fears to the material hardly seemed to mend matters. A dog meant a keeper, of course, unless it were a midnight poacher like themselves, in which event it would give them a wide berth; but this was too much to hope. On the other hand, if it were accompanying a keeper on his midnight round, the brute would certainly attack them; and that it was a large and heavy animal they could determine by the sound of its quick, fierce rushes to and fro, and a sort of deep-toned grunt which it uttered now and then as it snuffed the ground. Breathlessly they crouched. Ha! It was coming! The sound of its approaching rush in the pitchy blackness was almost upon them--then it passed. It had not discovered them yet, but evidently suspected their presence. When it winded them, as it might do any moment, then it would come straight for them. There was something terribly unnerving in this feeling of being hunted, and that by an enemy whose strength they had no opportunity of estimating. As the retreating sound grew fainter, Haviland suggested climbing a tree. There was no such thing as playing the ghost again. That was all very well with a keeper, but it wouldn't do for a moment with a dog. Besides, the brute could maul them horribly even before the keeper should arrive on the scene; but Anthony negatived the suggestion. "No climb tree," he said. "I kill him. Look, he come again." It was even as he had said. The rush of a heavy body through the undergrowth, this time on the other side of the ride, and then, from the darkness beyond, there sprang forth into the moonlit ride an enormous bull-mastiff.