Of such was Clement Hicks. And yet in this dark hour he cried for Justice, not knowing to whom or to what he cried. Right judgment was dead at last. He rose and shook his head in mute answer to the voices still clamouring to his consciousness. They moaned and reverberated and mingled with the distant music of the bellwether, but his mind was made up irrevocably now; he had determined to do the thing he had come to do. He told himself nothing much mattered any more; he laughed as he rose and wiped the sweat off his face, and passed down Steeperton through debris of granite. “Life’s only a breath and then—Nothing,” he thought; “but it will be interesting to see how much more bitterness and agony those that pull the strings can cram into my days. I shall watch from the outside now. A man is never happy so long as he takes a personal interest in life. Henceforth I’ll stand outside and care no more, and laugh and laugh on through the years. We’re greater than the Devil that made us; for we can laugh at all his cursed cruelty—we can laugh, and we can die laughing, and we can die when we please. Yes, that’s one thing he can’t do—torment us an hour more than we choose.”
Suicide was always a familiar thought with this man, but it had never been farther from his mind than of late. Cowardly in himself, his love for Chris Blanchard was too great to suffer even the shadow of self-slaughter to tempt him at the present moment. What might happen in the future, he could not tell; but while her happiness was threatened and her life’s welfare hung in the balance, his place was by her side. Then he looked into Will Blanchard’s future and asked himself what was the worst that could result from his pending treachery. He did not know and wished time had permitted him to make inquiries. But his soul was too weary to care. He only looked for the ordeal to be ended; his aching eyes, now bent on his temporal environment, ranged widely for the spectacle of a rider on a brown horse.
A red flag flapped from a lofty pole at the foot of Steeperton, but Hicks, to whom the object and its significance were familiar, paid no heed and passed on towards Oke Tor. On one side the mass rose gradually up by steps and turrets; on the other, the granite beetled into a low cliff springing abruptly from the turf. Within its clefts and crannies there grew ferns, and to the north-east, sheltered under ledges from the hot sun, cattle and ponies usually stood or reclined upon such a summer day as this, and waited for the oncoming cool of evening before returning to pasture. On the present occasion, however, no stamp of hoof, snort of nostril, whisk of tail, and hum of flies denoted the presence of beasts. For some reason they had been driven elsewhere. Clement climbed the Tor, then stood upon its highest point, and turning his back to the sun, scanned the wide rolling distances over which he had tramped, and sought fruitlessly for an approaching horseman. But no particular hour had been specified, and he knew not and cared not how long he might have to wait.
In a direction quite contrary to that on which the eyes of Hicks were set, sat John Grimbal upon his horse and talked with another man. They occupied a position at the lower-most end of Taw Marsh, beneath the Belstones; and they watched some seventy artillerymen busily preparing for certain operations of a nature to specially interest the master of the Red House. Indeed the pending proceedings had usually occupied his mind, to total exclusion of all other affairs; but to-day even more momentous events awaited him in the immediate future, and he looked from his companion along the great valley to where Oke Tor appeared, shrunk to a mere grey stone at the farther end. Of John Grimbal’s life, it may now be said that it drifted into a confirmed and bitter misogyny. He saw no women, spoke of the sex with disrespect, and chose his few friends among men whose sporting and warlike instincts chimed with his own. Sport he pursued with dogged pertinacity, but the greater part of his leisure was devoted to the formation of a yeomanry corps at Chagford, and in this design he had made good progress. He still kept his wrongs sternly before his mind, and when the old bitterness began to grow blunted, deliberately sharpened it again, strangling alike the good work of time and all emotions of rising contentment and returning peace. Where was the wife whose musical voice and bright eyes should welcome his daily home-coming? Where were the laughing and pattering-footed little ones? Of these priceless treasures the man on the Moor had robbed him. His great house was empty and cheerless. Thus he could always blow the smouldering fires into active flame by a little musing on the past; but how long it might be possible to sustain his passion for revenge under this artificial stimulation of memory remained to be seen. As yet, at any rate, the contemplation of Will Blanchard’s ruin was good to Grimbal, and the accident of his discovery that Clement Hicks knew some secret facts to his enemy’s disadvantage served vastly to quicken the lust for a great revenge. From the first he had determined to drag Clement’s secret out of him sooner or later, and had, until his recent offer of the Red House Farm, practised remarkable patience. Since then, however, a flicker of apparent prosperity which overtook the bee-keeper appeared to diminish Grimbal’s chances perceptibly; but with the sudden downfall of Clement’s hopes the other’s ends grew nearer again, and at the last it had scarcely surprised him to receive the proposal of Hicks. So now he stood within an hour or two of the desired knowledge, and his mind was consequently a little abstracted from the matter in hand.
The battery, consisting of four field-guns, was brought into action in the direction of the upper end of the valley, while Major Tremayne, its commanding officer and John Grimbal’s acquaintance, explained to the amateur all that he did not know. During the previous week the master of the Red House and other officers of the local yeomanry interested in military matters had dined at the mess of those artillery officers then encamped at Okehampton for the annual practice on Dartmoor; and the outcome of that entertainment was an invitation to witness some shooting during the forthcoming week.
The gunners in their dark blue uniforms swarmed busily round four shining sixteen-pounders, while Major Tremayne conversed with his friend. He was a handsome, large-limbed man, with kindly eyes.
“Where’s your target?” asked Grimbal, as he scanned the deep distance of the valley.
“Away there under that grey mass of rock. We’ve got to guess at the range as you know; then find it. I should judge the distance at about two miles—an extreme limit. Take my glass and you’ll note a line of earthworks thrown up on this side of the stone. That is intended to represent a redoubt and we’re going to shell it and slay the dummy men posted inside.”
“I can see without the glass. The rock is called Oke Tor, and I’m going to meet a man there this afternoon.”
“Good; then you’ll be able to observe the results at close quarters. They’ll surprise you. Now we are going to begin. Is your horse all right? He looks shifty, and the guns make a devil of a row.”