I saw his hand slip down to his pocket as we ran. The same thought was in both our minds. We broke through the underbrush on the far side of the road, stumbled by chance on the footpath and were racing along it, shoulder to shoulder, while the setter's barking still echoed in our ears. For a while his voice guided us. Then, abruptly, he was silent. We paused on the edge of the clearing to take breath. All was still--that closed-in stillness of the woods at night, when all daytime life hushed. Before us loomed the old mill, its broken roof and ruined timbers black against the sky. For a moment there was no sound but the pounding of the blood in our ears, the dry rustle of a dead bush as Herrick leaned forward, listening. Then suddenly, from somewhere in the recesses of the old building itself, there broke on that tense stillness another sound--more horrible to me than anything else--the hoarse choking breaths and muffled worrying of a dog at grips with his enemy. It came, not from the main floor of the mill, but from the basement where the water-wheel hung. There was a doorway on the near side of the mill, formerly used for carting away the sawdust, but it had been nailed up, and remembering this I called to Herrick as I ran directly for the steep slope on the side by the sluice. Here there was open space to squeeze through, and with Herrick close on my heels I trampled a way through the breast-high weeds and bushes round the corner of the building and gained an entrance. Within all was pitch black. The water was shut off, but a little trickle still flowed through, dripping from the slimy motionless bulk of the great wheel above us. The air was warm, heavy with the smell of rotting sawdust and of something else, fetid and nauseous. The worrying had ceased; we could hear the broken rapid breathing of two bodies, there, unseen, somewhere within a few feet of us in the darkness. I made a step forward, but Herrick clutched my arm, and as he did so the fight broke out again with renewed fury, somewhere it seemed up in the far corner, among the drifted sawdust. I could recognize the setter's deep-throated snarls, the snap of teeth seeking a grip, and with it was another voice, deeper and more guttural--something wholly strange and horrible--something that snarled and panted and coughed in choking gasps. The darkness moved; there came the breath of a warm animal body, the straining of a heavy weight flung against resisting wood, and then the nailed planks gave way, the sudden square of the doorway was obscured by a tumbling, heaving mass and the next instant we were alone--alone in the darkness with silence round us and that fetid unforgettable smell on the air. It was the same smell that Mary had complained of that evening, wafted to us as we sat on the porch--the smell, I knew now, that I had first noticed on the day I passed the Mennings' place in the early summer. "Phew!" said Herrick.