But his mother heard not his words. She had fainted, and with rough kindness was carried into the hut and laid upon the bed. When she revived some what they left her.
It was a long, dismal ride the unhappy man had that night; and indeed it was well on in the morning before the party with their prisoner reached the town of B—.
Bob’s appearance before a magistrate was followed almost instantly by his dismissal to the cells again. The magistrate knew him. The police had caught him “red-handed,” so they said, and had only succeeded in making him prisoner “after a fierce resistance.”
“Remanded for a week,” without being allowed to say one word in his own defence.
The policeman’s hint to Bob’s mother about “dark doin’s in th’ hill” was founded on fearful facts. A keeper had been killed after a terrible melée with the gang of poachers, and several men had been severely wounded on both sides.
The snow-storm that came on early on the morning after poor Bob Cooper’s capture was one of the severest ever remembered in Northumbria. The frost was hard too all day long. The snow fell incessantly, and lay in drifts like cliffs, fully seven feet high, across the roads.
The wind blew high, sweeping the powdery snow hither and thither in gusts. It felt for all the world like going into a cold shower-bath to put one’s head even beyond the threshold of the door. Nor did the storm abate even at nightfall; but next day the wind died down, and the face of the sky became clear, only along the southern horizon the white clouds were still massed like hills and cliffs.
It was not until the afternoon that news reached Burley Old Farm of the fight in the woods and death of the keeper. It was a sturdy old postman who had brought the tidings. He had fought his way through the snow with the letters, and his account of the battle had well-nigh caused old Kate to swoon away. When Mary, the little parlour maid, carried the mail in to her master she did not hesitate to relate what she had heard.
Squire Broadbent himself with Archie repaired to the kitchen, and found the postman surrounded by the startled servants, who were drinking in every word he said.
“One man killed, you say, Allan?”