Nevertheless he dropped to his hands and knees when he came to the outlying boulders and jagged slabs close to the foot of the black, towering mass. There was no protecting foliage here. Never in his life had he known the moon to shine so brightly. He whispered curses to the high-hanging lantern in the sky. The murmur of the river below brought a consoling thought to him. He would not suffer from thirst. He could go without food for a couple of days, even longer. Had not certain English women survived days and days of a voluntary hunger strike? But he could not do without water. In the black hours before dawn he would climb down from his eerie den and drink his fill at the river's brink. Now a sickening fear gripped him. What if he were to find it impossible to scale that almost perpendicular steep? What if those hand-hewn clefts in the rock fell short of reaching to the cave's entrance? The processes of time and the elements may have sealed or obliterated the shallow hand and toe holds. His blood ran cold. He had dreaded the prospect of that hazardous climb up the face of the rock. Now he was overcome by an even greater dread: that he would be unable to reach the place of refuge. He had no thought of Alix Crown now--no thought of her beauty, her body, her riches. His cherished dream was over. She took her place among other forgotten dreams. The sinister business of saving his own skin drove her out of his mind. It drove out all thought of Rosabel Vick. The hounds were at his heels. It was no time to think of women! II Anxiety that touched almost upon despair hastened his steps. Abandoning caution, he ran recklessly up the path among the rocks, stumbling and reeling but always keeping his feet, and came at last to the gloomy, forbidding facade of Quill's Window. Here he groped along the wall, clawing for the sunken cleats with eager, trembling hands. He knew they were there--somewhere. Not only had he seen them, he had climbed with ease, hand over hand, ten or a dozen feet up the cliff. He had shuddered a little that day as he looked first over his shoulder and then upward along the still unsealed stretch that lay between him and the mouth of the cave, seventy or eighty feet away. But that was in broad daylight. It would be different now, with darkness as his ally. He remembered thinking that day how easy it would be to reach Quill's Window by this rather simple route. All that was required was a stout heart, a steady hand, and a good pair of arms. All of these were bestowed upon him by magic of darkness. It was what the light revealed that made a coward of him. Why, he could shut his eyes tight and go up that cliff by night as easily as--but where were the slots?