I said no more, but followed him up the cliff side, scrambling and slipping like a boy upon a holiday jaunt, and no less eager for the heights. To the darkness of the night and the quickness of our movements, my faithful servant and I undoubtedly owed our lives. Remember that the valley now raised the cry of alarm from one end to the other. Whistles were blown, bells were rung, rifles fired wildly. That the bullets struck the rocks both above and below us, my ears told me unmistakably. Had we been an open mark moving in the clear light of day, the suspense of this flight, the doubt and the hazard of it had been easier to support. As it was, we went on blindly, our hands clasping the rough boulders, our feet scattering the pebbles of the path; and conscious through it all that a wild bullet might find a lucky billet and grass either or both of us as though we had been hares in a tricky covert. Never was a man more thankful than I when a vast fissure in the cliff side appeared before us suddenly as a sanctuary door opened by an unknown friend’s hand. By it we passed gladly, and were instantly lost to the view of those in the valley; while a profound silence of ultimate night enveloped us. There was no longer the need to pant and toil upon a crazy slope. Nature herself had here cut a path, and it appeared to lead into the very heart of the mountain. Now, this path we followed, it may have been for some two hundred yards in a direction parallel to that of the valley we had quitted. Its gentle declivity brought us in the end to a low cavern of the rock, and here we found the boatswain, Balaam, sitting with his back to the cliff, smoking his pipe and guarding his ship’s lantern as calmly as though the scene had been Rotherhithe and the day a seaman’s Saturday. Hearing our approach, he bestirred himself sufficiently to fend the light and to ask a question. “Would it be the Doctor and the wild man?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer he ran on, “I kenned your step, Doctor, and said you were doing finely. There’s firing on the hills, sir, and ye would be wise not to bide. I’m no gleg at the running myself, but yon manny can take the licht, and I’ll make shift for myself. Ay, Doctor, but if I had that bit of an ass the boys go daft upon——”