"Ten thousand devils!" cried he; "such a place as this I never se'ed in all my life afore. If my heyes beant nearly whipt out of my head with them 'ere blasted broom shafts, my name aint Tom Wetherby! Dang it, there again! that whip has peeled the very skin off my cheek, and made both my heyes run over with water like mill-sluices--I wonder at all where this she-devil can be hidden? Curse her! Do you think, Bill, that she can raaly have ridden off through the hair, as they do say they do? But for a matter of that, she may be here somewhere after all, for my heyes be so dimmed, that, dang me an' I could see her if she were to rise up afore my very face. How they do smart with pain! Oh! Lord, where am I going?" cried he, as he went smack down through the ferns and brush into the concealed bed of the rill, and was laid prostrate on his back in the narrow clayey bottom of it, in such a position that it defied him to rise. "Hollo Bill!" cried he, from the bowels of the earth, in a voice which reached his comrade as if he had spoken with a pillow on his mouth, but which rang with terrible distinctness down the hollow natural tube to the spot where Morag was concealed. "Hollo!--help!--help!" "What a murrain is the matter with ye?" cried Bill, very much astonished. "I've fallen plump into the witches' den!--into the very bottomless pit!--Hollo!--hollo! Help!--help!" cried the fallen trooper from the abyss. "How the plague am I to get to ye if so be the pit be bottomless?" cried Bill, in a drawling tone, that did not argue much promise of any zealous exertion of effective aid on the part of the speaker. "Curse ye, come along quickly, or I shall be smothered in this here infernal, dark, outlandish place," cried Tom Wetherby. "Well,--well," replied Bill, with the same long-drawn tone of philosophic indifference, "I'm a coming--I'm a coming. But you must keep chaunting out from the bottom of that bottomless pit of yours, do you hear, Tom, else I shall never find you in that 'ere wilderness. And how the devil I am to get into it is more than I know."