Leaving the car in a deep cutting of the hills and instructing the driver to await the return of one or other of them at a wayside farmstead a mile back, the three adventurers followed Spurge into the wood which led to the top of the Beaver's Glen. The poacher guided them onward by narrow and winding tracks through the undergrowth for a good half-mile; then he led them through thickets in which there was no paths at all; finally, after a gradual and cautious advance behind a high hedge of dense evergreen, he halted them at a corner of the wood and motioned them to look out through a loosely-laced network of branches. "Here we are!" he whispered. "Tower--Reaver's Glen--sea in the distance. Lone spot, ain't it, gentlemen?" Copplestone and Gilling, who had never seen this part of the coast before, looked out on the scene with lively interest. It was certainly a prospect of romance and of wild, almost savage beauty on which they gazed. Immediately in front of them, at a distance of twenty to thirty yards, stood the old peel tower, a solid square mass of grey stone, intact as to its base and its middle stories, ruinous and crumbling from thence to what was left of its battlements and the turret tower at one angle. The fallen stone lay in irregular heaps on the ground at its foot; all around it were clumps of furze and bramble. From the level plateau on which it stood the Glen fell away in horseshoe formation gradually narrowing and descending until it terminated in a thick covert of fir and pine that ran down to the land end of the cove of which Spurge had told them. And beyond that stretched the wide expanse of sea, with here and there a red-sailed fishing boat tossing restlessly on the white-capped waves, and over that and the land was a chill silence, broken only by the occasional cry of the sea-birds and the bleating of the mountain sheep. "A lone spot indeed!" said Gilling in a whisper. "Spurge, where is that stuff hidden?" "Other side of the tower--in an angle of the old courtyard," replied Spurge, "Can't see the spot from here." "And where's that road you told us about?" asked Copplestone. "The moor road?" "Top o' the bank yonder--beyond the tower," said Spurge. "Runs round yonder corner o' this wood and goes right round it to High Nick, where we've cut across from. Hush now, all of you, gentlemen--I'm going to signal Jim." Screwing up his mobile face into a strange contortion, Spurge emitted from his puckered lips a queer cry--a cry as of some trapped animal--so shrill and realistic that his hearers started. "What on earth's that represent?" asked Gilling. "It's blood-curdling?" "Hare, with a stoat's teeth in its neck," answered Spurge. "H'sh--I'll call him again." No answer came to the first nor to the second summons--after a third, equally unproductive, Spurge looked at his companions with a scared face.