Then above the noise of the navvies busy with pick and shovel, and the pleasant gargle of the night-jar, blended another sound. A hollow ominous rumbling like the voice of a great ghost laughing harshly in his grave came rolling across the sea out of the darkness. "Guns," said Ernie. "They're at it in the Bight." Ruth drew closer and took his arm. One finger was to her lips. She was a little bit afraid. He felt it, and pressed her arm. From the distance, muffled by the shoulder of the hill, came the hammer-hammer that would endure all night of the emergency gangs, rushed down in special trains from the North, to run up a huge camp in the great coombe at the end of Rectory Walk where of old lambs had often roused Ernie as a lad on bleak March mornings by their forlorn music of spirits exiled and crying for home. He stood and looked and listened. "Who'd ever ha beleft it'd ha come to this when we first lay out here six years ago?" he mused. "Or now for that matter," answered Ruth, her voice deep and hushed as the evening. "All so good and quiet as it looks." She pulled him down into the darkness of the covert. "D'is safer here, I reck'n," she said, and nuzzled up against him. Ernie peeped though the gorse at the lights flickering on the Head. "They ca-a-n't see us here," he said. "And a good job, too, I reck'n," answered Ruth sedately, fingering her hair. Ernie chuckled. "Listen!" he said. They sat close in their ambush, walled about with prickly darkness, roofed in by the living night. Beneath them the sea came and went, rose and fell, rhythmical and somnolent, as it had done in the days when badger and wolf and bear roamed the hill, with none to contest their sovereignty but the hoary old sea-eagle from the cliffs; as it might still do when man had long passed away. Sounds ancient almost as the earth on which they lay, which had lulled them and millions of their forefathers to sleep, were crossed by others, new, man-made, discordant. Down the road at the back of the covert, not a hundred yards away, came a sudden bustling phut-phut-phut. "Despatch-rider," said Ernie, peering. "Light out and all. Rushin it to Birling Gap. There's a company of Territorials there, diggin emselves in behind barbed wire to guard the deep-sea cables." "The Boy-Scouts were layin out all day on the road to Friston, Mr. Chislehurst told me," remarked Ruth. "They took the number of every motor and motor-bike on the road to Newhaven." She unloosed her hair that fell about her like a torrent of darkness. A huge beetle twanged by above them; and then in the covert close at hand there was a snuffling and grunting, so loud, so close, so portentous that Ruth, creature of the earth though she was, was startled and paused in her undoing. "What-ever's that?" she asked, laying a hand on Ernie. "Hedge-pig, I allow." "Sounds like it might be a wild boar routin and snoutin and carryin on," she laughed.