It was getting early dark to-night, and one great star was already out in the east. Whinny Moor was beginning to look eerisome enough. The patches of furze that everywhere hugged the ground were like moving shapes of strange and uncanny antediluvian monsters, and here and there stood up the dark spectre of a stunted hawthorn-tree waving black arms in the wind as if to forbid their approach.
Sometimes they had to creep quite sideways through the bushes of sturdy whins and bramble; sometimes the moor was more open, and here and there were little lakes or sedgy ponds of silver sheen, where black things swam or glided in and out among the rustling rushes. Flitter-mice darted over their heads or even between them, and from the forest now and then came the doleful cry of the great barn-owl.
'On the whole,' said young Blake, 'I'm glad you came, Lotty. I doubt if ever I could have made my way across this moor.'
'Nor through the forest yonder. Ah! the forest is much worse, Mr Blake.'
'Dark and dismal, I suppose?'
'It is dark; I don't know about dismal, Mr Blake. But I know all the road through this moor; because when things come to the station father often sends me for them.'
'At night?'
'Oh yes, often at night. Only, there is a little winding path through among the pine-trees, and one day Chops went in daylight and marked all the trees in white paint for me. But father thrashed him for it, because white paint is one of the show properties, and we mustn't waste the properties. But I cried for Chops.'
'And who is Chops, Lotty?'
'Oh, Chops is the fat boy; he is a property himself, but nobody could waste him.'