He had looked in vain for the lane
or avenue leading from the road up to Mr. Curtis's house. He could not
have passed it in his stroll, of that he was sure, and yet he
remembered distinctly seeing O'Dowd and De Soto turn their horses into
the forest at a point far back of the place where he now entered the
grounds.
The trees grew very thickly on the slope, and they were unusually
large. Virgin timber, he decided, on which the woodman's axe had made
no inroads. The foliage was dense. Tree tops seemed to intermingle in
one vast canopy through which the sun but rarely penetrated. The
bright green of the grass, the sponginess of the soil, the presence of
great stretches of ferns and beds of moss told of almost perpetual
moisture. Strangely enough there was no suggestion of dankness in
these shadowy glades, rich with the fulness of early Spring.
He progressed deeper into the wood. At the end of what must have been
a mile, he halted. There was no sign of habitation, no indication that
man had ever penetrated so far into the forest. As he was on the point
of retracing his steps toward the road, his gaze fell upon a huge
moss-covered rock less than a hundred yards away. He stared, and
gradually it began to take on angles and planes and recesses of the
most astounding symmetry.
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