“The commander’s pass. Good-night, the three of ye!”

“Are you drunk or drugged?” I demanded. “There are only two. It’s not sleep that is the matter with you. What is it?”

He made no answer, but stood holding the gate open and blinking at us with dull, unseeing eyes. Something ailed him besides sleep; he may have been drugged, for aught I know. When we had gone some yards from the gate, we heard him say again, in precisely the same tone, “Good-night, the three of ye!” Then the gate creaked to, and we heard the bars drawn across it.

Without the palisade was a space of waste land, marsh and thicket, tapering to the narrow strip of sand and scrub joining the peninsula to the forest, and here and