To the day of his death he never knew just how the event of that moment happened.  Did he, indeed, turn his horse, or did it really of its own accord stampede after its fellow?  Suffice it that in another second he was galloping full tilt down the valley with his sword whirling furiously overhead.  And all about him on the quickening breeze, the spiders’ air-ships, their air bundles and air sheets, seemed to him to hurry in a conscious pursuit.

Clatter, clatter, thud, thud,—­the man with the silver bridle rode, heedless of his direction, with his fearful face looking up now right, now left, and his sword arm ready to slash.  And a few hundred yards ahead of him, with a tail of torn cobweb trailing behind him, rode the little man on the white horse, still but imperfectly in the saddle.  The reeds bent before them, the wind blew fresh and strong, over his shoulder the master could see the webs hurrying to overtake...

He was so intent to escape the spiders’ webs that only as his horse gathered together for a leap did he realise the ravine ahead.  And then he realised it only to misunderstand and interfere.  He was leaning forward on his horse’s neck and sat up and back all too late.

But if in his excitement he had failed to leap, at any rate he had not forgotten how to fall.  He was horseman again in mid-air.  He came off clear with a mere bruise upon his shoulder, and his horse rolled, kicking spasmodic legs, and lay still.  But the master’s sword drove its point into the hard soil, and snapped clean across, as though Chance refused him any longer as her Knight, and the splintered end missed his face by an inch or so.

He was on his feet in a moment, breathlessly scanning the on-rushing spider-webs.  For a moment he was minded to run, and then thought of the ravine, and turned back.  He ran aside once to dodge one drifting terror, and then he was swiftly clambering down the precipitous sides, and out of the touch of the gale.

There, under the lee of the dry torrent’s steeper banks, he might crouch and watch these strange, grey masses pass and pass in safety till the wind fell, and it became possible to escape.  And there for a long time he crouched, watching the strange, grey, ragged masses trail their streamers across his narrowed sky.

Once a stray spider fell into the ravine close beside him—­a full foot it measured from leg to leg and its body was half a man’s hand—­and after he had watched its monstrous alacrity of search and escape for a little while and tempted it to bite his broken sword, he lifted up his iron-heeled boot and smashed it into a pulp.  He swore as he did so, and for a time sought up and down for another.

Then presently, when he was surer these spider swarms could not drop into the ravine, he found a place where he could sit down, and sat and fell into deep thought and began, after his manner, to gnaw his knuckles and bite his nails.  And from this he was moved by the coming of the man with the white horse.