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A yawning valley, gulfed in blackness, lay like a hole in created nature at my feet; but the outline of the hills was sharp against the sky. There was Mount Aigoal, the stronghold of Castanet.

And there he read the oath he had forgotten: 'With the compass needle of my soul true to the north star of my great ambition, I will follow where it leads. "Thrusting his fingers in his ears to silence the beloved voice of her who sang, he madly rushed from out the garden into the blackness of the night. The Castle of Content clanged its great gate behind him.

The reins were out of his hands, but somehow he continued to cling to the saddle as the mule leaped ahead. Then under Hannibal's hoofs the ground gave way, both of them tumbling into the icy stream. And for Drew there was instant blackness, shutting out the need for breath, the terrible agony which shook him. "... dead. Get on after the others!" The words made no sense.

He heard nothing. He did not think. So absolutely had he relived life that he had fainted just as he fainted years before on the Eighth Street Bridge. For a full minute the blackness and the blankness endured. Then, like one from the dead, he sprang upright, eyes flaming, sweat pouring down his face, shouting: "I licked you, Cheese-Face! It took me eleven years, but I licked you!"

"Well, I declare!" she exclaimed, with a laugh. "You're in a pretty fix, Dorothy Gale, I can tell you! and I haven't the least idea how you're going to get out of it!" As if to add to her troubles the night was now creeping on, and the gray clouds overhead changed to inky blackness.

As he said the last words the blackness before him surely gathered itself together, took a form, the form of a wave, towered up as a gigantic wave towers, rolled upon him to overwhelm him.

Through storm that had rocked the earth under her feet and set ablaze the chaotic blackness of the sky over her head she had struggled for him. She had counted no cost. She had measured no chances. She had simply come because she believed in him. And now, upstairs, she was the victim of the terrible price that was the first cost of his freedom.

The law-officers of the Crown were immediately instructed to prosecute the ministers who had attended, and fourteen of them were tried and sentenced to imprisonment two of them, Forbes the Moderator and John Welch, Knox's son-in-law, being sent to Blackness. Six of them having declined the jurisdiction of the Council, were tried for high treason by a packed jury, and found guilty by a majority.

In the depth of the jungle the cloud shadows produced a thick blackness that might almost be felt a blackness that to you and me might have proven terrifying with its accompaniment of rustling leaves and cracking twigs, and its even more suggestive intervals of utter silence in which the crudest of imaginations might have conjured crouching beasts of prey tensed for the fatal charge; but through it Tarzan passed unconcerned, yet always alert.

It was evident to him that the man had something to say, and he hoped that from the talk a ray of light would shoot through the thick blackness of inexplicable treachery, to show him clearly if only for a second the man upon whom he would have to execute the verdict of justice. Justice only! Nothing was further from his thoughts than such an useless thing as revenge. Justice only.