had followed; and crouching in crucial silence in the cloud of
leaves, they saw the whole posse of their pursuers go by and die
into the dust and mists of the distance.

The white vapour lay, as it often does, in lean and palpable
layers; and even the head of the tree was above it in the
half-daylight, like a green ship swinging on a sea of foam. But
higher yet behind them, and readier to catch the first coming of
the sun, ran the rampart of the top of the wall, which in their
excitement of escape looked at once indispensable and
unattainable, like the wall of heaven. Here, however, it was
MacIan's turn to have the advantage; for, though less
light-limbed and feline, he was longer and stronger in the arms.
In two seconds he had tugged up his chin over the wall like a
horizontal bar; the next he sat astride of it, like a horse of
stone. With his assistance Turnbull vaulted to the same perch,
and the two began cautiously to shift along the wall in the
direction by which they had come, doubling on their tracks to
throw off the last pursuit. MacIan could not rid himself of the
fancy of bestriding a steed; the long, grey coping of the wall
shot out in front of him, like the long, grey neck of some
nightmare Rosinante. He had the quaint thought that he and
Turnbull were two knights on one steed on the old shield of the
Templars.

The nightmare of the stone horse was increased by the white fog,
which seemed thicker inside the wall than outside. They could
make nothing of the enclosure upon which they were partial
trespassers, except that the green and crooked branches of a big
apple-tree came crawling at them out of the mist, like the