So while the others talked in their taciturn fashion, or sometimes grinned at my gloomy face, I looked out over the brown woods with eyes that saw yet did not see. The red squirrel swarming up the trunk, the startled pigs that rushed away grunting from their feast of mast, the solitary rider who met us, armed to the teeth, and passed northwards after whispering with the landlord--all these I saw. But my mind was not with them. It was groping and feeling about like a hunted mole for some way of escape. For time pressed. The slope we were on was growing steeper. By-and-by we fell into a southward valley, and began to follow it steadily upwards, crossing and recrossing a swiftly rushing stream. The snow peaks began to be hidden behind the rising bulk of hills that overhung us, and sometimes we could see nothing before or behind but the wooded walls of our valley rising sheer and green a thousand paces high on either hand; with grey rocks half masked by fern and ivy jutting here and there through the firs and alders. It was a wild and sombre scene even at that hour, with the mid-day sun shining on the rushing water and drawing the scent out of the pines; but I knew that there was worse to come, and sought desperately for some ruse by which I might at least separate the men. Three were too many; with one I might deal. At last, when I had cudgelled my brain for an hour, and almost resigned myself to a sudden charge on the men single-handed--a last desperate resort--I thought of a plan: dangerous, too, and almost desperate, but which still seemed to promise something. It came of my fingers resting, as they lay in my pocket, on the fragments of the orange sachet; which, without having any particular design in my mind, I had taken care to bring with me. I had torn the sachet into four pieces--four corners. As I played mechanically with them, one of my fingers fitted into one, as into a glove; a second finger into another. And the plan came. Before I could move in it, however, I had to wait until we stopped to bait the flagging horses, which we did about noon at the head of the valley. Then, pretending to drink from the stream, I managed to secure unseen a handful of pebbles, slipping them into the same pocket with the morsels of stuff. On getting to horse again, I carefully fitted a pebble, not too tightly, into the largest scrap, and made ready for the attempt. The landlord rode on my left, abreast of me; the other two knaves behind. The road at this stage favoured me, for the valley, which drained the bare uplands that lay between the lower hills and the base of the real mountains, had become wide and shallow. Here were no trees, and the path was a mere sheep-track covered with short, crisp grass, and running sometimes on this bank of the stream and sometimes on that.