Page:Joan, the curate.djvu/59

Rh briers of the blackberry bushes. The stream which flowed swiftly down, making little trickling waterfalls from rock to rock, was swollen by recent rains, and made little patches of morass and mire at every few steps. The lieutenant found the water over his ankles half a dozen times on his way down. He had just come in sight of the opening where the gig lay when, drawing his right foot out of a mossy swamp that squelched under his tread, he saw, with a sudden chill, that his boot was dyed a deep, murky red.

Scenting another outrage, he uttered an exclamation, and looked about him. Trickling down the side of the ravine into the mud and water of the little patch of swamp was a dark red stream—and the stream was blood.

He uttered a cry, a call; no one answered. The next moment he was scrambling up the side of the ravine.

At the top, lying in a patch of gorse that fringed the edge of the broken cliff, was the body of a coastguardsman, his head nearly severed from his body, and with the blood still oozing from the ghastly wound which had killed him.

The poor fellow's hands and limbs were ice