Bullstone's lads neared the end of their studies, and when summer came again, John Henry, in sight of seventeen, prepared for apprenticeship to the business of his choice.
To-day he was riding over the Moor, with his father and a farmer, to see sheep, while Margery and the others made pilgrimage for Huntingdon Warren. They carried their lunch and baskets for the whortleberrries, now growing ripe again; while more than their own food they took, for there had come a baby at Huntingdon and Margery conveyed certain delicacies for the wife of Benny Veale. Old Frederick Veale was dead; but Benny still worked the warrens; though rumour announced that he had nearly done with them and, at his wife's entreaty, intended soon to desert the waste and return into civilisation.
Peter and Auna ran this way and that as they climbed slowly aloft. They met the goats browsing together presently and played with them a while, then hastened after the retreating figures of their mother and sister. And then they played a new game, at the inspiration of Auna, and dyed their faces and hands with whortleberry juice. They were now Indians and, sticking a few feathers from a dead carrion crow into their hair, and brandishing spears, represented by Peter's fishing-rod, they rushed screaming upon Margery and Avis and demanded food at the point of their weapons.
Presently they returned to the river beyond Zeal Plains, where Auna and her brother washed the berry juice from their faces. Then Peter fished and caught some small trout with a worm. An hour later they tramped forward to Huntingdon Cross, ate their pasties and cake beside it and so proceeded to the Warren House.
Red Benny saw them from afar and came to meet Margery. He was now a stalwart man of forty, and claimed to get more out of the rabbits than any warrener before him; but that, he vowed, was because he worked harder than his predecessors. He was lean and immensely strong, and his wife seemed cut in his own pattern. The unexpected arrival of visitors excited them, for few ever called at their home. Tourists saw it afar, like a white eye under the tumulus on the hill behind it; but it seldom happened that anything but the wild Scotch cattle, or a moorman on a pony, came near the spot.
Sally Veale's second child was six weeks old, and Sally was by no means an invalid. She laughed at the nice things Margery had brought and displayed her baby.
"Red—red," she said. "The daps of Benny."
While Auna and Avis gazed fearfully upon the remains of a dead horse, and Peter played with Mr. Veale's lean lurchers, despising them in secret, Sally prattled to her visitor and declared her hatred of the Warren.
"No place for a woman and two babies," she declared; "and my husband's of my mind. He's pretty well fed up. I want to go to the in-country and for Benny to be a gamekeeper; and Mr. Blake, to Beggar's Bush, would take him on next fall, when his head man stops; but Benny's all for foreign parts and more trapping. He says that in the far north of Canada, a man like him could face the winters and catch creatures whose fur be worth their weight in gold. But if he does that, it will be out of the frying-pan into the fire for me I reckon."
"Work on him to go to Beggar's Bush," advised Margery. "Then you'll come down to Brent and have your neighbours about you. It's cruel and unnatural for us women to be shut off from the world."