He had been coming to visit us, and when he didn't arrive, my mother sent me out to look for him. I found him on a high, lonely path, tied on to his horse with his nose to its tail. He was very angry, and wanted revenge on the Doones. He asked me to show him where they lived, so that he could learn the best way to attack them 'when the time was right". So a day or two later I took him up into the mountains that looked down on the valley.
I had not been back this way since I was fourteen, and on the way, I thought of the girl I had met in this valley of her lovely dark eyes, her sweet smile, her sadness and her loneliness.
At the top of a steep cliff, we looked down into the long, green Doone valley. At either end was a narrow gap in the mountain walls. At the further end was the waterfall which I had climbed seven years before, and at the other was what we called the Doone-gate. This was two rocky cliffs facing each other, with only a narrow path between them. It was like the gate of a castle, and it seemed impossible to break into the valley. But Uncle Ben saw a way .
Do you see how you could attack them?' he said. "If you put big guns along the cliffs on both sides, and fired down into the valley, you could defeat the Doones in half an hour.
But I was not listening to him. I was looking across to the waterfall end of the valley, and a little figure in white walking there, someone who walked with a very light step