The house in the hills

Chapter I

On the 15th of September the Rev. Granville Masson wrote from Llandudno to his younger brother, a student at St. George's Hospital, London :

“ My Dear Regie — I don't know whether it is that my temper becomes shorter as the end of my holiday draws near, but I can't stand this place at all. It is full of people, and the crowds bother me. The weather is magnificent, which, of course, accounts for the fact that the numbers of the visitors have not yet begun to thin. As for my health, I don't know whether it is any better, but on the other hand I don’t think it is any worse. My cough is still rather troublesome at night. I am a regular ‘ pale young curate ' now, and I think I rather resent the sympathetic glances the old ladies throw in my direction. It is evident that they consider me ‘ interesting,' a distinction at which, to do me justice, you will own I have never aimed. I think I shall go on, staying a day or two at Bettws-y-Coed, to South Wales, to get away from the eternal camera and bicycle, and from the equally eternal young lady with the highpitched voice and the novel which she carries about and never reads. Yours. Granny.”

On the 24th of September the same writer dated his letter from Aberystwith.

“ Dear Regie — This place is better, not quite so full. On the other hand, I don't feel quite so well. This is to be accounted for, however, by the change in the weather, which is now wet and cold. I have been out to the Devil’s Bridge, but I am going to do something more interesting. There are some much less frequented and wilder regions to be explored in this part of Wales than up in the North, which is like Regent street. Don't be surprised if you don't hear from me for a fortnight. I shall be on tramp. “ Yours, Granny.”

Reginald Masson, who was much troubled about the health of his brother, wrote off to him at once, on receipt of this letter, begging him not to be too venturesome and not to begin exploring unknown tracts of country in weather so unpropitious.

He got one more letter, dated September 30, acknowledging his note of warning and announcing that Granville had put off his expedition in deference to his brother's advice. The weather having now changed for the better, however, he intended to proceed without further delay.

He wrote in a robust and cheerful tone, as if in the highest spirits over his proposed excursion, He had got hold of an odd creature, lie said; a wild, uncouth, red-headed son of the mountains, who was going to act as his guide and to coach him up in all the old Welsh tales and superstitions.

And then his brother heard no more.

At the end of one week Reginald was curious ; at the end of the second impatient; after the lapse of a third he was anxious and worried. The weather had grown bitterly cold for the time of year, and already reports had reached London of snow in the mountains of Scotland and of heavy rains in Wales. He wrote half a dozen letters to Aberystwith, addressed to his brother, to the proprietor of the hotel where he had stayed, to the Chief of Police. But all without much result. The proprietor of the hotel wrote that the Rev. Granville Masson had left the hotel on the morning of October 2 and had taken the train with the intention, as he stated, of alighting at Trecoed and of making a tour on foot from that town among the points of interest in the neighborhood.

The Chief of Police wrote that he had heard of no accident befalling any traveller recently in the country. And the letters Reginald had addressed to his brother were returned to him.

Thoroughly alarmed, he determined to go down into Wales himself, and to make inquiries, starting from the small town of Trecoed. It was near the middle of November when he arrived at the place and made direct for the principal inn. Here, at the very outset of his researches, he came upon the track of his brother. The innkeeper nodded intelligently at the first questions put by Reginald Masson.

“ A young clergyman, tall, thin, gray eyes and brown hair? Yes, sir, he was here for one night about five weeks ago. But I can give you the exact date by looking at my books, and I can show you his portmanteau. I suppose I am right, sir, in thinking you are his brother? ”

'‘Why, what made you think that? We are not supposed to be at all alike.”

“ Not in face, sir, but in voice. I could have recognized the voice anywhere, and that in spite of the way of speaking young clergymen always have.”

"And can you tell me where he went to from here? ”

“ He was going to explore the country and make his way down gradually to the south by the Black Mountains and the Neath Valley and along the Chepstow, and then up the Wye, and so round here again to fetch his luggage.”

“ He meant to come back here?”

"Well, sir, he said he might and he might not. If he didn't come, he was to let me know where to send his luggage on.”

"And what was the date of that?” asked Reginald Masson, whose anxiety was not much allayed by this intelligence.

The landlord was looking through his book.

“ It was on the 3d of October that he went away.”

“ Was he alone?”

“ He was alone when he left the house, but I had warned him not to cross the mountains without a guide, and he said he had engaged one.”

“Ah! We can find him out, I suppose, with' out any trouble? ”

But the landlord shook his head dubiously.

“ I don't know about that, sir. It wasn't one of our regular men, I know that. It was some one he had met before he came here, near the Devil’s Bridge, I understand, who had told him a lot of the local stories and legends and had arranged to take him across by Llyn Foel to Llandu.”

“ Did he mention his name? ”

“ Well, he may have done, sir, but if so I've forgotten it.”

At this point of the conversation a man whose composite style of clothing suggested that, in the off season, he filled various functions at the inn, edged near enough to the speakers to show that he wished to join in the conversation.

Reginald Masson turned to look at him, and the man saluted.

“ Beg pardon, sir,” said he in a strong Welsh accent, “ but was you speaking of the clerical gentleman who left some of his luggage here a few weeks back? ”

“Yes, yes. Well?”

“ It was me who saw the last of him when he left here, sir, and he went out by himself, with just his little bag carried across him on a strap.”

“By himself?”

“Yes, sir. But, look you, as soon as he had left the house, not more than a quarter of an hour after, there come up a fellow who asked for him, and who went off after him, a fellow I know very well, sir.”

“ Well, and who was it? ”

“ It was a big, read-headed fellow, sir, who's employed on one of the sheep farms over in the hills yonder. He comes in most every market day.”

“ And can you tell me his name? ”

“ No, sir. I only know him through seeing him about. He drives in the sheep, and he buys and sells in the market for his master. So I've gathered. A rough-looking customer.”

Reginald Masson's heart sank. Then a passion of energy and anger seized him. It was impossible to doubt that some evil had befallen his brother, and this information seemed to point to the direction in which he must look for a solution of the mystery.

Although he was burning with impatience to prosecute his inquiries, it was too late to do so that night. Already the little town was asleep; the lights in the windows were for the most part extinguished; there was hardly a footfall in the street.

Reginald went up to his room, but he could not sleep. This rough, red-headed fellow who had come to the hotel immediately after Gran-

X 3 ville's departure from it, could be, of course, no other than the “ wild, uncouth son of the mountains ” of whom his brother had written in his last letter. To find this man, therefore, was plainly the first thing to be done.

On the following morning the waiter who had given him the information came up to Reginald and told him that he had made inquiries in the town that morning and learned that the name of the red-headed man was unknown, but that he was called “ Coch Tal ” as a nickname in the sheep market at Aberayron.

“ And have you been able to find out where he lives ?” asked Reginald.

“ Yes, sir. It's up in the hills yonder, over by Llyn Foel. He's in the employ of a farmer yonder, Mr. Tregaron of Monachlog farm.”

“ Is that far off? ”

“ It's a matter of five or six miles, look you, up along the valley. But it would be hard for you to find without a guide, sir, being right up among the hills.”

“ Well, you can find me a guide, can't you? ”

u Oh, yes, sir. You don't think of going to-day, sir, do you?”

“ Certainly I do. Without a moment's delay.”

“ Well, sir, it's a nasty day for such a walk. We shall have snow before midday by the look of the sky, and when the snow comes on it’s hard work for them that knows the paths well to find their way among the hills.”

“ Well, hard v/ork or not, I have to go. And if you can't find me a guide I must go without one.”

Reginald was eating ham and eggs, but with very little appetite. His anxiety and feverish eagerness to be on the road made breakfast a hard task.

“ All right, sir. I’ll find you a guide, sir,” said the waiter.

And then he shuffled away with apparent haste until he reached the door of the coffeeroom, when he turned slowly and hesitatingly, and came back again. His tone had become mysterious.

“ I think, perhaps, I ought to tell you, sir, something they told me this morning, when I was asking about the young man Coch Tal.”

“ Well, what was it? ”

“ I was told, sir, that he's not been seen so much in the town lately — not since the beginning of last month, in fact. He's been ill, they think; don't look the same man, sir, when he does come, as he used to look.”

“ Thank you. Now see about getting me the guide, there's a good fellow,” said Reginald, as he jumped from his seat and began to button Up his coat. “ My boots, please.”

“ You’ve quite made up your mind to go, sir? ”

“ Quite.”

The matter of obtaining a guide into the hills proved, however, to be less easy than Reginald had supposed. He had to wait so long, in fact, before the waiter, who had undertaken the search for <*ne, returned to the inn, that at last

The House iu the Hills 15

Reginald, unable to control his impatience any longer, told the landlord to send the guide after him, and started on his journey into the hills alone.

The flakes of snow had already begun to flutter down, and he was strongly advised to give up his expedition until the following day. He would not, however, hear of any delay.

He started at a brisk pace, quite undisturbed by any thought that his journey might be one of difficulty or even danger. The lightly falling snow threw a soft veil over the landscape, softening the rugged outline of the hills towards which he was going, and filling up the ruts in the road.

He had gone some distance, walking quickly, and deeply preoccupied with his gloomy thoughts concerning his brother's fate, when it occurred to him to wonder why the guide was such a long time in coming.

At the same moment the thought came into his mind, with an ugly persistency, that it was in this very same fashion that Granville had started on the expedition which had, in all probability, been a fatal one to him.

Chapter II

Reginald Masson turned round, and looked back along the way by which he had come.

At least, it would be more correct to say that he tried to do so. For he now perceived that the snow had for the last ten minutes been coming down so fast as to reduce the wide space over which he had travelled to a flat expanse, in which to trace out the road by which he had come was, to his inexperienced eyes, an impossibility.

His very foot tracks, not having been made in deep snow, were already obliterated; and the wind was driving the flakes straight into his eyes as he stared and stared, vainly trying to recognize some landmark by which he could find his way back.

He felt that to venture further without the guide would be madness. Yet to go back, now that the snow was driving from that direction, was almost equally difficult. As he paused for one moment, deliberating, and blinking to keep the snow out of his smarting eyes, he heard a man's voice behind him, evidently at some distance, singing one of those wild, half-mournful, wholly tender Welsh ballads which are forever on the lips of these people of the mountains.

Reginald Masson turned again, facing the

*7 mountains once more. With his back to the wind, it was easier to see, and he managed to distinguish a dark figure on the rising ground a little way ahead of him, making its way slowly through the snow in the direction of the hills.

Reginald shouted, but the man went on singing and took no notice. Against the whitening background and through the veil of falling snow his figure stood out, seeming to be gigantic in size.

There was nothing for Reginald to do but to follow this, the only human figure in sight. Quickening his pace, not without difficulty, for the road had dwindled into a rough foot track, he came up with the stranger at a point where the path began to wind round the side of a hill. By this time the town was so far behind and the snow was falling so thickly that Reginald Masson felt that the only safe thing to do was to address himself to this stranger, who could hardly be as ignorant of the country as he was himself.

The man had quickened his pace; and was now making his way, still singing to himself, with long strides, which made it difficult for the town-bred Masson to overtake him. So that at last Reginald had to speak from behind, without having had one opportunity of seeing the face of the man he was addressing.

“ Can you tell me,” called out he, “ if I am on the right road for Monachlog, and how far off it is?”

The man in front had stopped with a disconcerting suddenness before his interlocutor had got to the end of his question. His body, which had been bent nearly double as he ascended the hill, thick stick in hand, had become upright and rigid, but he did not turn round, and he did not answer.

Reginald, coming a step nearer and trying to get a look at the man’s face, repeated his question.

He might as well have poured his words into the ears of a statue of bronze. The stranger, a man of enormous height, dressed in the rough clothing of the hillside peasant, his head and face almost hidden behind the collar of a coat which he wore cloak fashion over his shoulders, answered never a word — did not even turn his face toward his questioner.

Supposing that the man was deaf, Reginald, who was now close to him, touched him on the arm. But the moment he did so a paroxysm of terror seemed to seize the fellow; he shook off the light touch with an abrupt and violent movement, and, still without turning his head, began 10 run up the hillside path as if for his life.

For a few seconds Reginald watched him in amazement, thinking that the fellow must be an imbecile. But then it occurred to him as possible that it might be only the uncouth native way of treating a stranger, a way compounded of rustic shyness and superstitious fear. For fear was apparently the emotion uppermost in the heart of the flying countryman.

*9

The snow was now coming clown in larger flakes; the sky had grown heavy and lowering. After one more glance back Reginald saw that to follow this son of the mountains was his best chance of safety. The man had now got so far ahead, however, being evidently used to these paths in all weathers, and sure of foot as a mule, that Reginald had some difficulty in keeping him in sight.

Up the rugged, slowly ascending footpath, which he would never have been able to find but for the footprints of the peasant, winding round the hill, descending again, turning, twisting about among the rough hill tracks, now with a peep into glens and valleys where the gray shadows lurked in the corners, now shut in on all sides by the bare and stony hills, Reginald followed his unwitting guide.

The way grew wilder as they went. The hills grew loftier, stonier; patches of dark gray rock showed black against the snow, while here and there a tuft of bush and briar, or a lonely, stunted tree, stood up from the white ground like a gaunt, misshapen figure, bent into strange curves by the weight of the snow it bore, and seeming to point with a dark, fleshless finger into the recesses of the barren hills.

The figure in front had never once turned, and Reginald felt sure that the sturdy mountaineer was unaware that he was serving as guide to the stranger whom he had treated so cavalierly. At last, after a rough and toilsome descent of a barren hillside, made dangerous to the foot passenger by great quantities of small, loose stones, the pursuer having at last gained somewhat upon the pursued, the two found themselves in a cleft of the mountains, through which a wild, weird sight presented itself to the view.

In a rough basin formed by the stony, barren mountains, lay stretched before their eyes the dark waters of a lake, which looked inky-black against the snow which lay all around. Here and there on its borders a great gray bowlder, snow-capped, but bare and dark on its scoopedout sides, stood upon the flat expanse of untrodden snow r . Nothing else, not a tree, not a bush, broke up the monotonous stretch of bleak, desolate shore and black, lonely pool. As the big snowflakes fluttered down swiftly and softly into the black waters, each absorbed as soon as it fell, Reginald shuddered, with a sudden hideous fancy that in some such silent, grim fashion, a lonely traveller might be swallowed up by the cold, placid waters of this mountain tarn in the shadow of the hills.

Even the rustic in front seemed to be impressed by the wuld and awful desolation of the scene; at any rate he paused, and thus gave Reginald an opportunity of getting up to him.

Determined not to be evaded or avoided this time, Masson seized the huge peasant in a strong grip, and with an unexpected movement, brought him face to face with himself so suddenly that the other man slipped upon the loose stones, lost his footing and fell down.

As he did so, his round cap fell off, and Reginald Masson, with a great leap up of the heart, saw that his head was covered by a thick crop of short red hair.

“Coch Tal!” shouted Masson.

The peasant made no answer except by a guttural exclamation.

But his face, which had been red with exercise, blanched to a livid pallor. He scrambled to his feet, and with one wild stroke of his stick, which Reginald was quick enough to avoid, he sprang like a deer down the narrow ravine, and disappeared behind a spur of the hill.

Chapter III

With a savage shout, as the huge mountaineer escaped him, Reginald Masson sprang down the ravine after him. He could not doubt that this was the very man of whom he was in search, the man who could give him, if he chose, some news of Granville's fate. That this information would have to be wrung out of him by the ungentlest means, and that, when obtained, it would amount to little more than a tissue of lies, he felt sure.

In the wild eyes and blanched cheeks of Coch Tal, Reginald had read the signs of an abject, sick terror, which warned him of what he already guessed, that his brother’s fate had been a tragic one, and that this rough, uncouth creature, whom he had taken for his guide, was cognizant, to say the least, of the details of it.

As he stumbled down the moutain side in hot pursuit, indeed, Reginald felt not a doubt but that he was chasing his brother’s murderer. Everything that he had heard and seen seemed to confirm this impression, which stamped itself each moment more firmly in his mind.

There flashed through his brain, even as he ran, stumbling, leaping, sinking in the snow at every other step, those words of the waiter at the inn, telling him that Coch Tal had been ill

2 3 since the beginning of last month — the time of Granville’s disappearance; that he had been seen less in the town since that date; that he had seemed, since then, “ a changed man.”

These circumstances, trifling in themselves, became important when taken in conjunction with the man’s horror at the sound of Reginald’s voice. He felt that it was the resemblance between his voice and his brother’s which had struck such infinite terror into the mind of the peasant; terror which had become more acute when he heard his own nickname pronounced by the lips of a man whom he had never seen before.

And while these thoughts, stimulated by the fierce passion which possessed him, chased each other through Reginald’s mind, his feet flew from point to point of the rough way, with ever increasing rapidity. It seemed as if the exaltation of his mind had communicated new powers to his body; for he followed Coch Tal with more ease, more security than before, and rounding the hill at a great pace when he reached the foot of it, he found himself only a little way behind the object of his pursuit.

The peasant heard him, gave one look round, and uttering once more the guttural exclamation, like the cry of a wild bird, which had chilled Reginald’s blood when they first came face to face, he went on his way at a swifter pace than ever.

On they went again, pursuer and pursued, with the snow and the wind driving at their backs, filling up the crevices and the ruts in the rough foot tracks, and swirling into drifts to right and left of them.

Up the rough side of a mountain, which looked as they approached it like the stone wall of a huge fortress or prison; up, up, up, tearing his hands on the crags of rugged gray stone, which jutted like pin-points out of the snowdrifts, went Reginald, his teeth set and his heart beating like a hammer in his breast.

The mountaineer could beat him at this work: could climb like a cat where his pursuer could only crawl. And the distance between the two began rapidly to increase. The peasant was out of sight when Reginald reached the top.

There were now only the footprints in the snow to guide him, but even as he took the first step forward in the track Coch Tal had made a gust of wind, which he felt with redoubled force on this bleak hilltop, whirled the snowflakes round him in a blinding storm, forcing him to turn and to shelter his face. When for some seconds the blast had howled and whistled and roared in his deafened ears, and the drifts had swept up from the ground in blinding sheets of stinging spray, there was a sudden lull, a momentary calm, and as the wind died the snow fell less heavily.

Reginald raised his head, shook himself clear from the thick white coatings of hard dry snow, and looked around him for the traces of the peasant’s footsteps.

They were gone, all trace of them swept away under the smooth white sheet.

He shivered as he looked about him; down into the dark waters of the black tarn below him on his left hand; at the barren hills on the sides of which great perpendicular slabs of cold gray rock relieved the white mass and disclosed the stony bareness of the soil; at the lowering clouds above, which seemed to be descending on his head; at the never ending prospect of hills, hills, bare and cold and white, and melting into forlorn gray distances on every side.

Look which way he would, he could see no sign of human habitation. Chilled to the marrow with something which was worse than cold, worse almost than fear, he recognized the desperate situation in which he was placed and knew that the chances of his getting back to Trecoed alive were infinitesimally small.

Although he had left the inn before noon, with the day before him, he saw by his watch that it was already 4 o'clock, and the gray of the winter evening was already gathering in the valleys and ravines beneath.

Where should he turn? Not back by the way he had come, even if that had been possible. For he had passed not a hut, not a cottage, and he could not hope to find his road to Trecoed before night fell.

Making a rapid exploration of the small tableland on which he stood, Reginald fancied that he descried, half way up the side of a hill on his right, of lower elevation than the one upon which he was standing, and less rugged in appearance, a gray shapeless something which looked like the fragment of a ruined building. In his desperate plight even such a chance of a precarious shelter for the night as a ruin might afford caused him a sensation of something acute as joy.

To discover this possible refuge was one thing, but to get to it was another. So Reginald Masson soon found as he started down that side of the mountain which appeared to offer the most direct route. This descent was the most perilous thing he had undertaken that day; the mountain was steep, strewn with loose stones, and its pitfalls and inequalities were hidden beneath the snow.

Any sort of path or foot track was of course not to be discerned; a way had to be found, haphazard, between the jutting gray crags and a stunted growth of rugged pine trees, which grew on the side of this hill a little distance from the summit.

Having passed through the narrow belt of wood Masson found himself, without warning, cn the brink of a perpendicular cliff, which formed one side of a mountain pass, ioo feet below him.

The snow was falling heavily again, the daylight had grown fainter, and the ruin toward which his steps were bent was no longer in sight. He turned back, and making his way among the rough tree trunks, which afforded some valuable assistance in the scramble among the stones, he got at last to the bottom of the hill, and, turning to the left, reached something like level ground.

Then he stopped and looked about him. The silence, the loneliness, were awful. The big flakes of snow touched his face like the cold fingers of dead hands. Before him he saw nothing but the bare, bleak sides of the mountain pass, and a black patch beyond which he knew to be the waters of Llyn Foel. At his feet trickled, in a thin, snake-like line, the feeble lake-fed stream which became, some miles away, a fair sized river. Behind him was a dreary white waste and all around were frowning heights of gray, grim hills, with the night shadows growing black in the crevices which the snow could not reach.

The oppression on his spirits was so great that he felt it a labor to draw breath. With difficulty groping in his mind toward a remembrance of the relative positions of the pass, the mountain he had descended, and the hill upon which he had discerned the ruin which it was his ambition to reach, he at last turned his back to the pass and made his way with difficulty beside the stream, the course of which he followed.

He had gone some fifty yards, and had seen or heard nothing to help him on his way, when a sound suddenly reached his ears and seemed to pierce the air like an arrow.