I say that he went on unflinchingly, and surely no goat could have climbed quicker than he did. Now standing over an abyss which made you silly to look down into; now pulling himself up by bush or branch; at other times scrambling over loose shale as though he had neither hands nor knees to cut, he might well have scared the coolest who had met him without warning on such a road. As for the four men he had saved from the devils in the thickets below, I don't believe there was one of them who didn't trust him from the first. The sea is a sure school for knowing men and their humours. If this old Frenchman chose to put a petticoat about his legs, and to wear a lion's mane down his back, we liked him all the better for that. What we had seen of the young girls' behaviour towards him made up for that which we did not know about him. He must have had a tender place somewhere in his heart, or three young women wouldn't fondle him like a dog. Like a ship out of the night had he crossed our path; and his port must be our port, since we knew no other. That's why, I say, we followed him over the dangerous road like children follow a master. He was leading us to some good haven--I had no doubt of it. The thing that remained to tell was, had we the strength and the breath to reach it? You may imagine that it was no light thing to run such a race as we had run, and to be asked to climb a mountain on the top of it. For my part, I was so dead tired that every step up the hillside was like a knife in my side; and as for Peter Bligh, I wonder he didn't go rolling down to the rocks, so hard did he breathe and so heavy he was. But men will do wonders to save their necks, and that is how it is that we went up and still up, through the black ravine, to the blue peaks above. Aye, a fearsome place we had come to now, with terrible gorges, and wild shapes of rocks, like dead men's faces leering out of the darkness. The wind howled with a human voice, the desolation of all the earth seemed here. And yet the old man must push on--up, up, as though he would touch the very sky. "The Lord be good to me," cried Peter Bligh, at last; "I can go no farther if it's a million a mile! Oh, Mister Begg, for the love of God, clap a rope about the wild man's legs." I pushed him on over a sloping peak of shale, and told him to hold his tongue. "Will you lie in the pool, then? Where's your courage, man? Another hundred yards and you shall stop to breathe. There's the old lion himself waiting for us, and a big bill of thanks he has against us, to be sure."