“Now look here, Roderick,” Lionel said, “I’m entirely in your hands, and mind you don’t spare me.  Since I’m in for it, I mean to see it through.”

“When it is after a stag we are, there is no sparing of any one,” said Roderick, significantly, as he took out his telescope.  “And you will think of this, sir, that if we are crahling along, and come on the deer without expecting it, and if they see you, then you will lie still like a stone.  Many’s the time they will chist stand and look at you, if you do not move; and then slowly, slowly you will put your head down in the heather again, and wait till I tell you what to do.  But if you go out of sight quick—­ay, so will they.”

At first, as it appeared to Lionel, they went forward with a dangerous fearlessness, the keeper merely using his natural eye-sight to search the slopes and corries; but presently he began to go more warily; again and again he paused, to watch the motion of the white rags of cloud clinging to the hillsides; and occasionally, as they got up into the higher country, he would lie down with his back on a convenient mound, cross one knee over the other, and, with this rest for his telescope, proceed to scrutinize, inch by inch, the vast prospect before him.  There was no more talking now.  There was a kind of stealthiness in their progress, even when they walked erect; but it soon appeared to Lionel that Roderick, who went first, seemed to be keeping a series of natural eminences between them and a certain distant tract of this silent and lonely land.  It was only a guess; but it accounted for all kinds of circuitous little turns; anyhow, there was nothing for him but to follow blindly whither he was led.  Of course he kept his eyes open; but there was no sign of life anywhere in this barren wilderness; there was nothing but the empty undulations of heath and thick grass, with sometimes a little tarn coming in sight, and always the farther hills forming a sort of solitary amphitheatre along the horizon.

Suddenly Roderick stopped short, and quietly put out his hand to arrest the progress of his companions.  Involuntarily they stooped; and he not only did likewise, but presently he was on his back on the heather, with the telescope balanced as before.  After a long and earnest scrutiny, he offered the glass to Lionel.

“They’re there,” he said, “but in an ahfu’ bad place for us.”

Eagerly Lionel got hold of the telescope and tried to balance it as the keeper had done; but either his hand was trembling, or the wind had a purchase on the long tube, or he was unaccustomed to its use; at all events he could make out nothing but nebulous and uncertain patches of color.

“Tell me where they are,” he said, quickly, as he put aside the glass.  “I have good eyes.”

“Do you see the gray scar on the hillside yonder?—­then right below that the rocks—­and then the open place—­can you see them now?  Ay, and there’s not a single hind with them—­”