Free Five Get Into a Fix by Enid Blyton Page B

very puzzled. So there was a lot of truth in that woman"s peculiar tale, after all!
    They awoke late the next morning, for they had been tired out with their exertions the day before, and with the excitements in the night. Julian leapt out of his bunk when he found that it was actual y ten to nine, and dressed quickly, cal ing to the others. He went out to get some snow to put into the kettle.
    Soon breakfast was ready, for Anne was next to get up, and she began quickly to prepare some food. Boiled eggs and ham, bread, butter and jam - and good hot cocoa again. Soon they were all eating and chattering, talking over the happenings of the night, which somehow didn"t seem nearly so remarkable now that daylight was everywhere, bril iant with the snow, and the sun trying to come out from behind the clouds.
    As they sat round the table, eating and talking, Timmy ran to the door and began to bark.
    “Now what"s up?” said Dick. Then a face looked in at the window!
    It was a remarkable face, old, lined and wrinkled, yet curiously young-looking too. The eyes were as blue as a summer sky. It was a man"s face, with a long, raggedy beard and a moustache.
    “Gracious - he looks like one of the old prophets out of the Bible,” said Anne, real y startled. “Who is he?”
    “The shepherd, I expect,” said Julian, going to the door. “We"ll ask him in for a cup of cocoa. Maybe he can answer a few questions for us!”
    He opened the door. “Are you the shepherd?” he said. “Come in. We"re having breakfast and we can give you some too, if you like.”
    The shepherd came in, and smiled, making many more wrinkles appear on his weather-beaten face. Julian wondered if he spoke English, or only Welsh. He was a fine-looking fel ow, tall and straight, and obviously much younger than he looked.
    “You are kind, young sir,” he said, standing there with his crook, and Anne suddenly felt that there must have been men just like this all through the history of the world, ever since there had been sheep on the hil s, and men to watch them.
    The shepherd spoke slowly, for English words were not easy to him. “You want to send - to send - words - to the farm?” he said, in the lilting Welsh voice, so pleasant to hear.
    “Oh yes - please take a message to the farm,” said Julian, handing him some bread and butter, and a dish of cheese. “Just say we"re fine, and al is wel .”

    “Al is wel , al is well,” repeated the shepherd, and refused the bread and cheese. “No. I do not eat now. But the drink, yes, I wil have, and thanking you I am, for the morning is cold.”
    “Shepherd,” said Julian, “did you hear queer noises last night - rumblings and grumblings -
    and did you feel shudderings and see a coloured mist over the hil yonder?”
    The shepherd listened intently, trying to follow the strange English words. He understood that Julian was asking him something about the opposite hil .
    He took a sip of his cocoa, and looked over to the hil . “Always it has been a strange hil ,”
    he said slowly, pronouncing some of his words queerly, so that they were hard to understand. “My grandad told me a big dog lay below, growling for food, and my granny said witches lived there and made their spel s, and - and the smock rose up...”
    “Smock? What does he mean by that?” said George.
    “He means „smoke" I should think,” said Julian. “Don"t interrupt. Let him talk. This is very interesting.”
    “The smock rose up, and we saw it in the sky,” went on the shepherd, his forehead wrinkled with the effort of using words he was not familiar with. “And it comes stil , young ones, it comes stil ! The big dog, he growls, the witches they cook in their pots, and the smock, it rises.”
    “We heard the big dog growling last night, and saw the witches" smoke,” said Anne, quite under the spel of the lilting voice of the old shepherd.
    The man looked at her and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. But the dog is worse now and the