The path, leaving the forest, brought me to a cooler lighter world where my panic abated as quickly as it rose. My own experience in the plantation beyond the river was enough to teach me that strangers, inexpert in the country, would never come on our cave by night. I was ready to reproach myself for a timorous imaginative fool by the time I came to the foot-bridges that span the Pattock’s divided streams. I sat down on the rail of one bridge to draw my breath. The country seemed lost in sleep. Every house was dark. I guessed it was past one in the morning. The blurred valley sloped upwards into woods, and the woods ended in a jet-black line against the hills, and the hills climbed against the sky. I felt a touch of frost in the air. The deep blue of the sky lightened towards the north, as I had often seen in frosty weather when the wild fires of frost that burn around the pole irradiate the Monadhliah scarp, warning us of winter. A sliver of white moon, hung like a sword in blue air, rested over Gallovie. I went into the fields to steal the new potatoes I had come for.

I came first on a field of corn. It was trampled down as if by a herd of cattle. When I kneeled to peer at the ground I could distinguish the mark of boots, and cattle’s hooves, in the soft earth. I crossed from that field into its neighbour. It was drilled as if for potatoes or turnips but nothing grew from the drills. I kneeled once more to assure myself that my eyes were not deceiving me. The night was too peaceful and normal for such discoveries as affronted my senses. Half-withered green shaws lay between the drills, with yellowed turnip tops and potatoes the size of a marble. I commenced to delve hurriedly in the tattered drills, groping in the earth with my fingers for potatoes overlooked by whoever had forestalled me. I found a few potatoes, but when I had scraped and scratched methodically for half an hour, gleaning no more than a few pounds of tiny potatoes, I tried a new plan. I walked up and down the drills in search of crops that had escaped the harvesters. I found a crop here and there hidden amongst shaws. At length I had a fair weight in my bag. I left the potato patch to hunt for turnips. They likewise had been uprooted by hasty inexpert hands. I gathered a dozen bulbs which had been overlooked. Then I stuffed the game-bag with green turnip-tops until it would hold no more and I was ready to go home.