Page:Adventure v002 n06 (1911-10) (IA AdventureV002N06191110).pdf/174



F YOU go through the glades and green tree-tunnels round about that triangular iron monument erected to commemorate the spot in the New Forest where the Red King was killed by an arrow glancing from a tree, and from that place proceed westerly—leaning perhaps a little south—you will open up a region of wide bleak spaces, where there are no oak and beech and elm, but only sparse heather and fir, with patches of plentifully-spined gorse. It is desolate in that place and you may go many miles without encountering anything living other than forest ponies, a few yellowhammers, an occasional hurrying pigeon, here and there a lonely lark fleeing from under your feet, and, not infrequently, vipers in and about the marshy places.

In mid-Winter, when a black frost has glazed the snow, this part of the forest has something remotely Russian about it in a small but effective way.

It was in that neighborhood, then, that the affair I have made it my business to relate took place. My friend Torrance, who is an extremely out-door man, has a rather elaborate bungalow there and it was the third time I had come down to pass the beginning of a New Year with him.

He had not come personally to the little country station, just outside the Hampshire boundary of the forest, to meet me. His man—old Gregg—had driven in for me and, unemotional though Gregg knows how to be, I think that he was more than usually pleased to see me.