Page:Idalia, by 'Ouida' volume 2.djvu/269

258 thither. Some who saw them crossed themselves, and took them for the shades of some ghastly huntsman and his phantom hound; others, more practical, took them for truffle-seekers, despite the gigantic size of the animal. Not one ever ventured to stop them; a rough muleteer once tried a parley in the midnight on a lonely hill-side path, and said something, with a menace, of his fancy for the brandy-flask, whose silver head he saw under the folds of the waist-sash; but a blow with the butt-end of one of the pistols soon silenced him by levelling him with the brown-burnt moss, and Erceldoune was molested no more. Slowly—very slowly—and with an infinite toil and patience, he worked his way by the guidance of the hound's lead, till the dawn of the fourth day brought him into the rugged, desolate, morass-intersected country, where, dark and sullen above the miasma-haunted lake at its foot, the square castellated building of the isolated monastery stood among its stunted trees, with the bare grey cliff towering at its back. It was a red, stormy, misty, oppressive morning, very hot and poisonous in its heat as the steam rose up from the black still waters and the wastes of swamp, while beyond stretched the grey of the monotonous olive and the still more distant