him, and overhead, rose up the ghost country, haggard, void and unending. Under him Art Scannell struggled, cursing, and scratching as a weka scratches with spurred wings and feet. Dead trees reeled past, white stripes on the broad back of night, with long shaggy moss blowing from them like a beard on the chin of Death.
“That is a dead man calling me across the distance,” said Randal, speaking without volition, for sense told him that it was a mo-poke frightened by the gallopping hoofs.
Beneath his knees Art Scannell was still, and a fear colder than death took him by the heart strings. He half rose. And then Art Scannell caught him about the middle, and the reins were gripped in his white young teeth. The bleared trees drew in, right and left; plunged at Randal, and held him fast. This was Death, with a tearing pain in the sinews, and that dead man calling as a bird calls in the middle of the night.
A sentence struck him from no given place as the leaders rammed a tree butt and turned the coach over. It was curt, and very intense, and it never came out of the Prayer Book. But it brought Randal to his feet.
“By ———, Murray!” he said, “have you been there all the time? Where’s Art?”
“I don’t know where he is,” said Murray, watching the wheelers kick the fore-carriage
