the big dog still insisted, so at last he opened the door.
He stood before the cottage, looking in every direction, north, south, east; the sun was in his eyes so that he shaded them with his hand to look across the open meadows to the west. Was that something moving, was it a distant, plodding, weary figure slowly making its way up the slope? He could not be mistaken. It was Oscar!
With a shout of joy Hugh ran to meet him, but stopped short in surprise and dismay when he came close. Oscar’s forehead was cut and had been bleeding; his cheek was discolored with a great bruise; he carried neither pack nor gun, and he limped as he came toiling painfully up the hill.
“I had a fall,” he explained briefly, in answer to Hugh’s anxious questions.
Long after, Hugh learned the real details of the mishap, how Oscar had taken shelter from the storm under a mass of overhanging rock, how the fury of wind and water had loosened it above
