He had felt it too--that night in Acacia Grove in pursuit of the Greatest
Show--and once again. He could smell the scent of the trees and the
young grass blowing in his face.

And at the bottom there had been a mysterious wood like a deep, green
pool.


Then on the eighth day Cosgrave disappeared. He had set out in the early
morning for the nearest station to fetch their letters and fresh
provisions, and at dusk a village youth reached Stonehouse with a note
which had been scrawled in such haste that it was almost illegible. It
was as though Cosgrave had yielded suddenly and utterly to a prolonged
pressure.

He had to go back to town. It was something urgent. Stonehouse was not
to bother. He would be all right now.

The next day Stonehouse stalked and brought down his first "Royal." This
time the chase had cost him every ounce of his endurance, and in the
chill dusk he stood watching the gillie at his work on the lovely body
(still so warm and lissom that one could almost see the last sorrowful
heaving of its golden flanks) with a kind of stolid triumph as though now
he had wiped out that other failure, for he realized that he had been
both too sanguine and too impatient. When you were angling a man with a
sick brain back to health, you had to go slowly--delicately.

"It's because I care," he thought, half amused and half angry. "And why
do I care? It's as he said--a rotten habit."