AMIDST THE HILLS

Just then a ripple of laughter came down the breeze, and round the corner of the road, heading for Nikko, came at full trot seven rikshas streaming out like a scarf of color; a dream of color—for each riksha contained a lady most beautiful to behold under the splendor of her umbrella.

They were a party of girls returning to Nikko after some sylvan freak, and they drew up as if by common assent to admire the azaleas.

Leslie, removing his hat and lifting his treasure trove, held her up for exhibition.

The girls laughed and spoke to her; had they been English girls she would have been promptly handed round and kissed; and she, with becoming gravity, replied gracefully in a few half-lisped words.

Then, leaving behind them on the air a cloud of dust, a perfume of camellia oil, and a long drawn "Sayonara," the bevy of beauties passed in a gorgeous flight of mixed colors round the bend of the road and were gone.

"Ye mind he said seven rikshas were coming," cried Mac.

"Bother!" answered Leslie. "He'd come the same direction and passed them. Do you think they'd have laughed and spoken to her if there was anything wrong and they're Japs, and ought to know. Come! buck up, man! You're not afraid to do what a girl has done?"

"A'weel!" said M'Gourley, half ashamed of himself; and dour as any Procurator Fiscal, he set to the examination of the being who was now on the ground again, her hand clasped in that of Leslie.

This was the result of the examination. Deponent lived with her father. Where? She did not know.—Just beyond there somewhere. What was the house like she lived in? It had a plum-tree growing before it. What did her father do? He hammered things with a hammer. Had she any brothers and sisters? No; but—sudden thought—she had a sugar-candy dragon, and she had lost it. (Here deponent wept slightly and with reserve.)

Pause in the interrogations whilst a snub nose was wiped with Leslie's pocket handkerchief.

And a kite, but that was at home. She had gone that day with a little boy—a neighbor—to hunt for the saccharine dragon, and they had lost themselves, then they had lost each other, then she had lost herself. How was that possible? Well, she had gone to sleep. Where? In the wood.

Here the examinate went off into a tale about an impossible tom-cat with wings, which she had once seen on an umbrella, and beheld once again in the wood, but was suppressed by the court and asked to keep to facts.

Whilst asleep in the wood she was awakened, so she declared, by a sound like the passage of a flight of storks, and, coming out of the wood, fearful of meeting a dragon, she began to pick the pretty flowers; then she was seized by the honorable gentleman, whose height was greater than a poplar tree.

How old was she? Eight times the cherry blossom had blown since her humble self had come into the world.

Then she volunteered the entirely unsolicited statement that it was likely her little boy companion had been lost in the snow. But that was impossible—well, it was a field of lilies then—and he had been most possibly devoured by a dragon.

What did she propose about going home? Did she know the way, and could she go alone?

Here she declared herself utterly at a loss. Her home was somewhere near by, but where, she could not exactly say.

"Well, well!" said M'Gourley, when he had finished his examination. "It seems to me that bogle or no bogle you've saddled yoursel' wi' a lost child. Whaur's your common sense now?"

"Just where it always was.—Question is—what are we to do? Can you suggest anything?"

"Na, na! it's not for me to say," said the other, with that vile sense of satisfaction a brither Scot feels when a brither Scot has made a cubby of himself. Then, remembering the bond of partnership, "If I were the party responsible, I'd just pop her back where I fund her first, and rin."

"Well, you are a beast! Why, you benighted old mummy-stuffer, I believe you've got a scarab in your bosom instead of a heart! I'll take her along to Nikko, and get the police to hunt out her home. Stay, we haven't asked her what's her name."

M'Gourley asked the question, and the Lost One declared her name to be "Bell-flower."

"Bell-flower!" said Leslie, who had a smattering of botany, "that's a campanula. We'll call her—'Campanula.'"

She also made declaration that she was quite satisfied to go with the honorable gentleman, whose height exceeded the tallest of trees. Leslie lifted her up and seated her upon his shoulder, and, as they started, he turned and looked back at the loveliness of the perfumed azalea valley—a sight that was yet to haunt him in the time to come.

"It's my opeenion," said M'Gourley, as they took the road, "that there was something forming in yon wood, something dom bad, and you flung it out of the forming eelement, and she was just suckid in."

"What d'you mean?"

"The wraith of some dead bairn was wanderin' aboot, and the forming eelement seized it."

"What forming element? Rubbish! That chap was a lunatic; well, when he felt me touch him it set his lunacy off, that's all. Why, I once went to a big asylum in Scotland, and I saw a man cutting just the same capers, fighting devils. He's an opium taker, and the opium is out of his brain, that's all. Drink does the same thing—Hi! By Jove, look up there! He's at it still."

Away up in the wild mountain gorge they saw a figure. It was the Blind One still pursued, still running, and apparently fighting for his life. If his actions were not the outcome of insanity they gave food to the mind for the most terrible suppositions.

Streaming with blood from his mad dashes against the trees, he seemed surrounded on all sides, hemmed in, fighting furiously like a man surrounded by wolves. If a tree chanced to be near, an opening seemed to be made for him by his tormentors towards it, and he would rush at it and dash himself against it, falling back bleeding but fighting still, screaming and all the time being steadily shepherded further and further into the loneliness of the hills.

"Sirs! Sirs!" cried Mac, throwing up his hands as the horrible spectacle vanished round a distant bend of the gorge. "This is no sight for a Christian mon!"

"It's pretty rotten," said Leslie who looked rather pale and sick. "Fetch out that flask of yours, Mac. Thanks. Poor devil! would there be any use following him?"

"Not for twanty thousand pounds would I follow him," said Mac, gurgling at the flask. "He's in ither hands than ours."

And, indeed, not for a very great sum would Leslie have gone up that desolate gorge to see the finish of the tragedy.

"Let's go on," said Leslie, "and don't let's speak of it again. I want to forget it—ugh!"