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She must have walked very fast." "I only hope she isn't still up there," said Dan with a laugh, waving his hand towards the tors. "Poor old Anna!" "Oh!" squealed Betty, who loved horrors and excitements, "suppose she is, and sees us going farther and farther away from her. If she called and called, nobody would hear her, and oh, she'll be so frightened.
After the age of "alley tors and commoneys," of albert-rock and hard-bake, in which we both gambled frightfully, I could afford him no opportunities of gratifying this passion; but if he could get a little money "on" anything, there was nothing that pleased him better not that he cared for the money, but for the delight of winning it. The next moment he would give it away to a beggar.
The tors, from being uplifted wild castles, became mere grey excrescences. Distance failed. The cuckoos were silent. There was none of the beauty that there is in death, no tragic greatness all was moaning and monotony. But about seven the sun tore its way back through the swathe, and flared out.
"Uncle," as he was called, grunted again, and went on searching amongst the water-weeds with his net, his tendency being with the stream, while the boy, who did not scruple about stepping into the shallows from time to time, went on whipping away upward towards where one of the tors rose in a chaotic mass of broken, lichen-covered, fragmentary granite, apparently hiding in the distance the source of the little bubbling and sparkling stream.
Ramshackle buildings clustered untidily about its base, and to it a sort of tongue of that oddly venomous green which patched the lowlands shot out and seemed almost to reach the tower-base. The land for miles around was as flat as the palm of my hand, saving certain hummocks, lesser tors, and irregular piles of boulders which dotted its expanse.
We found a short valley between rugged tors which led to an open, grassy space flecked over with the white cotton grass. In the middle of it rose two great stones, worn and sharpened at the upper end until they looked like the huge corroding fangs of some monstrous beast. In every way it corresponded with the scene of the old tragedy.
They were to go away for a summer holiday, after all, she wrote excitedly, and evidently impressed with the idea that she was conveying wonderful news. They were to go to Dartmoor. Father had taken rooms in a big farmhouse on the moors, and it was lovely; there were horses and wagons, and hay-fields and orchards, and big tors where they could go for picnics.
Presently he stood on the side of lofty Steeperton and surveyed that vast valley known as Taw Marsh, which lies between the western foothills of Cosdon Beacon and the Belstone Tors to the north. The ragged manes of the latter hills wind through the valley in one lengthy ridge, and extend to a tremendous castellated mass of stone, by name Oke Tor.
The moon shone on it, and it looked like a great shimmering ice-field, with the heads of the distant tors as rocks borne upon its surface. Holmes's face was turned towards it, and he muttered impatiently as he watched its sluggish drift. "It's moving towards us, Watson." "Is that serious?" "Very serious, indeed the one thing upon earth which could have disarranged my plans.
They were nearing the outskirt fields of cultivation. It was past five when, dropping from the level of the tors, they came into the sunny vale of Monkland. "They say," said Crocker, reading from his guide-book "they say this place occupies a position of unique isolation." The two travellers, in tranquil solitude, took their seats under an old lime-tree on the village green.
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