“Up there,” said Paul. “Look — by that crooked tree.”
The goatherd stared down at the company. He had the flaming red beard that most Baronians had, and he wore ragged trousers of goat-skin, and nothing else.
“He looks awfully wild and fierce,” said Nora. “I don’t think I want to talk to goatherds if they look like that!”
“Oh, they are quite harmless!” said Ranni, laughing at Nora’s scared face. “They would be more frightened of you than you would be of them!”
It was fun at first to jog along on the ponies for the first few miles, but when the road grew steeper, and wound round and round, the children began to wish the long journey was over.
“There’s one thing, it’s lovely and cool,” said Jack.
“It will be quite cold at nights,” said Ranni. “You will have to sleep with thick covers over you.”
“Well, that will be a change,” said Jack, thinking of how he had thrown off everything the night before and had yet been far too hot. “I say — I say — is that Killimooin Castle?”
It was. It stood up there on the mountain-side, overlooking a steep gully, built of stones quarried from the mountain itself. It did not look new, and it did not look old. It looked exactly right, Nora thought. It was small, with rounded towers, and roughly hewn steps, cut out of the mountain rock, led up to it.
“I shall feel as if I’m living two or three hundred years ago, when I’m in that castle,” said Peggy. “It’s a proper little castle, not an old ruin, or a new make-believe one. I do like it. Killimooin Castle — it just suits it, doesn’t it?”