Mark had been very quiet and thoughtful at home, reading, or making believe to read, and spending a good deal of time in the mine with Dummy Rugg, who twice over proposed that they should go on exploring the grotto-like place he had discovered; but to his surprise, his young master put it off, and the quiet, silent fellow waited.

He, though, had more tales to tell of the way in which things disappeared from cottages.

Pigs, sheep, poultry went in the most unaccountable way, and the witches who met sometimes on the mountain slope had the credit of spiriting them away.
"Then why don't the people who lose things follow the witches up, and see if they have taken them ?" "Follow 'em up, sir ?" said Dummy, opening his eyes very widely.

"They wouldn't dare." Then came a day when, feeling dull and bitter and as if he were not enjoying himself at home, as he did the last time he was there, Mark mounted one of the stout cob ponies kept for his and his sister's use, and went for a good long round, one which was prolonged so that it was getting toward evening, and the sun was peering over the shoulder of one of the western hills, when, throwing the rein on his cob's neck, and leaving it to pick its own way among the stones of the moorland, he entered a narrow, waste-looking dale, about four miles from the Tor.
He felt more dull and low-spirited than when he started in the morning, probably from want of a good meal, for he had had nothing since breakfast, save a hunch of very cake-like bread and a bowl of milk at a cottage farm right up in the Peak, where he had rested his pony while it had a good feed of oats.
The dale looked desolation itself, in spite of the gilding of the setting sun.

Stone lay everywhere: not the limestone of his own hills and cliffs, but grim, black-looking millstone-grit, which here and there formed craggy, forbidding outlines; and this did not increase his satisfaction with his ride, when he took up the rein and began to urge the cob on, to get through the gloomy place.
But the cob knew better than his master what was best, and refused to risk breaking its legs among the stones with which the moor was strewn.
"Ugh! you lazy fat brute," cried Mark; "one might just as well walk, and--Who's that ?" He shaded his eyes from the sun, and looked long and carefully at a figure a few hundred yards ahead till his heart began to beat fast, for he felt sure that it was Ralph Darley.