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It was a sweet, fresh autumn morning in Lonesome Valley. Before night the deer would bellow reply to the hunters' rifles, and the mountain-goat call to its unknown gods; but now there was only the wild duck skimming the river, and the high hilltop rising and fading into the mist, the ardent sun, and again that strange cry "Fingall! Oh, Fingall! Fingall!"

He understood nothing of all the words which she tried to say for her voice, which only yesterday had been so sweet, to-day was inaudibly hoarse except the one name "Phoebicius," and he felt no doubt that she clung to the stone over the abyss, so that, like the mountain-goat when it sees itself surprised by the hunter, she might fling herself into the depth below rather than be taken by her pursuer.

A quiet land is this a land where the slow-moving Basque, with his flat biretta-cap, his red sash and his hempen sandals, tills his scanty farm or drives his lean flock to their hill-side pastures. It is the country of the wolf and the isard, of the brown bear and the mountain-goat, a land of bare rock and of rushing water.

Still keeping under shelter of the abundant trees, the Mochuelo led his companion to the rear of the platform. There the mountains rose in precipices, and the most careful examination only showed one path, that being such as few besides a mountain-goat or a chamois-hunter would willingly have ventured upon, by which the lurking-place of the guerillas could on that side be approached.

Capital jokes were passed round that night while we were discussing the qualities of the mountain-goat flesh, but yet I felt annoyed at our feat; the thing, to be sure, had been gallantly done, still it was nothing better than highway robbery.