"Poor little fool!" said Jessop Reed to himself, as soon as he was alone; "you are getting rather in the way." CHAPTER FIVE. THE TREASURE HOUSE. Clive Reed stood up like a statue on a natural pedestal, high on the precipitous slope. It was a great ponderous block of millstone grit, which had become detached just at the spot where, high up, mountain limestone and the above-named formation joined. And as he looked about him, it seemed wonderful to a man fresh from London that he could find so great a solitude in central England. Look where he would, the various jumbled together eminences of the termination of the Pennine range met his eye; there was hardly a tree in sight, but everywhere hill and deeply cut dale, the down-like tops of the calcareous, and the roughly jagged crags of the grit, while, with the exception of a few white dots on a green slope far away, representing a flock of sheep, there was no sign of life, neither house, hut, nor church spire. "Yes, there is something alive," said the young man, "for there goes a bee wild-thyme hunting, and whir-r-r-r! Think of that now, as somebody says; who would have expected to see grouse out here in these hills?" There they were, sure enough, a pair which skimmed by him as he stood at the very edge of the great gash in the mountain-side, at the bottom of which the track ran right into the mine he had come down to inspect for the third time, after walking across from the town twelve miles distant, where he had left the train on the previous evening. "Wild, grand, solitary, on a day like this," said Reed to himself; "but what must it be when a western gale is blowing. Come, Master Sturgess, you're behind your time again." He glanced at his watch. "No; give the devil his due," he muttered. "I'm half an hour too soon, and, by George, not so solitary as I thought. Behold! two travellers wending their way across the desolate waste, as the novel-writers say. Now what can bring a pair of trousers and a petticoat there?" The young man shaded his eyes and looked across the gap to where, far away, the two figures he had seen moved so slowly that they seemed to be stationary. Then they separated a little, and the man stooped and then knelt down. "Can't be flower-gatherers out here. I know: after mushrooms. But let's see." Clive Reed dragged the strap which supported a tin case slung from his shoulder, forced it aside, and tugged at another strap so as to bring a little binocular into reach; and adjusting this, he followed his natural instinct or some strange law of affinity, and brought the little lenses to bear upon the female in place of the male.