“There is a path—a tunnel under the matted briers. It took me more than a week to cut it out. It is possible to reach Fool’s Acre. We can try—with our rifles—if you say so, Mrs. Cleves.” The girl looked up. A little colour came into her cheeks. She shook her head. “Their bodies may not be there in the garden,” she said absently. “What you saw may not have been that part of them—the material which dies by knife or bullet.... And it is necessary that these Yezidees should die.” “Can you do anything?” asked Cleves, hoarsely. She looked at her husband; tried to smile: “I must try.... I think we had better not lose any time—if Mr. Selden will lead us.” “Now?” “Yes, we had better go, I think,” said the girl. Her smile still remained stamped on her lips, but her eyes seemed preoccupied as though following the movements of something remote that was passing across the far horizon. CHAPTER XIV A DEATH TRAIL The way to Fool’s Acre was under a tangled canopy of thorns, under rotting windfalls of grey mirch, through tunnel after tunnel of fallen débris woven solidly by millions of strands of tough cat-briers which cut the flesh like barbed wire. There was blood on Tressa, where her flannel shirt had been pierced in a score of places. Cleves and Selden had been painfully slashed. Silent, thread-like streams flowed darkling under the tangled mass that roofed them. Sometimes they could move upright; more often they were bent double; and there were long stretches where they had to creep forward on hands and knees through sparse wild grasses, soft, rotten soil, or paths of sphagnum which cooled their feverish skin in velvety, icy depths. At noon they rested and ate, lying prone under the matted roof of their tunnel. Cleves and Selden had their rifles. Tressa lay like a slender boy, her brier-torn hands empty. And, as she lay there, her husband made a sponge of a handful of sphagnum moss, and bathed her face and her arms, cleansing the dried blood from the skin, while the girl looked up at him out of grave, inscrutable eyes. The sun hung low over the wilderness when they came to the woods of Fool’s Acre. They crept cautiously out of the briers, among ferns and open spots carpeted with pine needles and dead leaves which were beginning to burn ruddy gold under the level rays of the sun. Lying flat behind an enormous oak, they remained listening for a while. Selden pointed through the woods, eastward, whispering that the house stood there not far away. “Don’t you think we might risk the chance and use our rifles?” asked Cleves in a low voice. “No. It is the Tchor-Dagh that confronts us. I wish to talk to Sansa,” she murmured. A moment later Selden touched her arm. “My God,” he breathed, “who is that!” “It is Sansa,” said Tressa calmly, and sat up among the ferns. And the next instant Sansa stepped daintily out of the red sunlight and seated herself among them without a sound.