"You didn't see anyone coming down the fellside, did you, when you were gathering the kye?"
"Nay, never a soul. Every man o' sense has got his flocks into shelter by now."
Lucy returned to the kitchen.
"Jan Straw's by with himself," she said.
Her great-grandmother continued to knit composedly.
"Look up the dale, and see if you can spy Peter," she said with a wicked gleam in her eyes.
"He's old enough to look after himself," replied the girl tartly.
"Then look up the dale and see if the storm has broken on Thundergay. I'm wondering about Barbara."
Lucy did as she was bid. The sky was shrouded by a heavy pall, through which the sun still shone as through smoked glass. But the mountain had disappeared. Now and then it flashed into sight as the lightning played round it, then darkness swallowed it up.
Meanwhile Barbara was standing at the mouth of the cave. She looked a very solitary being in the midst of that tremendous gathering of the tempest. The forces which nature had wakened were so overpowering and mysterious, they could have swept her away, if she had exposed herself to them, like a withered leaf. Everything around her was magnified by the lightning—the cliffs were towers, the bushes distorted creatures, the rocks—fragments from the heights above, which former storms had thrown about like pebbles—loomed in the darkness as big as elephants or those prehistoric beasts, the mammoths that Timothy Hadwin had told her about. Behind her the mouth of the cave yawned like a black mouth waiting to swallow her up. The dogs crept close to her side, the sheep, too, seemed to be reassured by her presence. Could they have spoken they might have uttered the words said by the Red-skins to Montcalm: