The kind old face looked distressed.
"A hint in your ear, master," and the man bent down and whispered, "murder."
"No, no, you're mistaken. He's just excited and has been drinking too much."
"It's murder! I saw it in his face. If School-master Peter is a wise man he'll go school-mastering to another place, and take his wife with him."
Red Geordie mounted his horse, and rode off saying:
"I ken what's what in the man's face. I don't ride the pack roads for nowt, master."
CHAPTER XX
The Spell of Thundergay
The winter was one of storms. They rose suddenly towards evening, and continued intermittently throughout the night, with long, strange pauses between each, until the dawn of the next morning, when the sun got up amid bars of yellow and purple cloud. But the glory of sunrise was brief. The days were cold, short, and grey, and when darkness fell the wind howled as though nature were in a fury bordering upon madness. The silences, too, which fell so suddenly, when the storm was at its highest, seemed to indicate periods of exhaustion, like those which follow upon the unbridled passions of human beings.