It was a glorious morning, the sun shining brightly, and strangely warm for February, as the car in which I had travelled from London with three companions, all of them Scotland Yard men, pulled up at a farmhouse within two miles of Eldon. The journey from London, begun at three in the morning on the previous day, had been broken at Skipton, near Harrogate, where we had spent the night. Now, as the five of us—for our driver was also, I discovered, a member of the force—walked briskly along the narrow, winding lane in the direction of the park which surrounds Eldon Hall, the morning air was refreshing, also intensely invigorating. We looked little enough like London men, and I doubt whether anybody meeting us would for an instant have supposed that we were not what we intended that we should look like, namely well-to-do tenantry of Lord Cranmere's bound for the scene of the coming-of-age festivities. It was barely nine o'clock, and at eleven the morning's sports were to begin. Several carts overtook us, loaded with cheery fellows; some of whom shouted rustic jests as they passed us by, which my companions were quick to acknowledge. We had walked, I suppose, rather less than a mile, when we suddenly came to a stile. "Here's our short cut," the man who walked beside me said, as he stopped abruptly. "Many's the time I've climbed over this stile more years ago than I like to think, sir," he remarked lightly. "My father was under-keeper to his lordship's father, and I've not been back since twenty years. It's not a bit changed, though, the old place, not a bit, I'm going, when I retire on my pension, to live down here again. I want to leave my bones where I was born, and where my father's and mother's are. It's a fine country, this sir, not a county like it in the whole of England," he added with enthusiasm. "And you see yonder cross-roads? That's Clun Cross—there's said to be a highwayman buried at that cross-roads with a stake pushed through his body." "Clun Cross." I remembered the name at once. It was the name that had appeared in one of the advertisements deciphered by Dick. We made our way up the steep footpath which led across a cramped field. Now we were on the boundary of a thickly underwooded cover. "There's not a tree in this wood I don't remember," he said, looking about him as we scrambled up the bridle path. Bracken up to our waists was on both sides, and it grew and hung over so thickly that the path was barely visible. As we reached the top of the track he gave a low whistle. Instantly the whistle was answered. A moment later half a dozen men rose up out of the undergrowth. At the foot of a clump of pine trees in the middle of the wood, we lay down to confer. Then it was I learned, for the first time, something of the line of action the police had decided to adopt.