Hirst had all but finished half the dish of bacon, and three eggs to go with it. He felt ready for the day’s work, and, as the way of a true man is, his temper gained in cheeriness.
“I’m like a lover to your whims, lile Cilla. If you’re set on coming—well, I’ve a sort o’ fondness for the tread o’ your heels beside me. Hark ye! The wind’s rising fast, and there’s a snarl at the tail on’t. ’Tis a bitterish end to spring warmth, this. Don your high boots, lass, and don ’em quickly.”
Cilla went, with the pleasant, quiet obedience which smoothed many a rough road for Yeoman Hirst. She was back again before he had time to grow impatient.
“Now, though I say it, Cilla, ye look workmanlike and trim,” roared her father. And he laughed, as good fathers will, with some surprise that he should have reared a bairn so full of comeliness.
“Father, there’s work up yonder in the snow,” she answered, with a gentle laugh. “You can praise me afterwards.”
“That’s true,” said Hirst soberly. “Praise can always bide like money in a safe-sure bank. Work willun’t bide; it never did and it never will, lile Cilla.”
The road in front of Good Intent was thick with snow when they went out, for the wind was harrying it as farm dogs chase the roving sheep. Hirst’s own dogs, when he whistled them from their shelter under the windward side of a mistal, came trudging to him through a lake of velvety, soft stuff that hindered them.
They went up into the pastures, father and daughter, and it was hard to tell where the ewes lay with their lambs, or where the white hummocks of the snow were lifted by the wind. Hirst’s farm-hands, cursing the weather as they followed him, were puzzled to know snow from fleece, and the dogs were full of petulance. The snow came down in wet, big flakes. The wind sobbed and wailed, and rose now and then in sudden gusts, driving the snow-dust savagely across their eyes. And through the wind-gusts, and the sharp, impatient barking of the dogs, there came the wild crying of the sheep, the pitiful and weakling cry of lambs half frozen.
One by one they found the ewes, and it was odd to see how the mothers, not valiant at usual times, daft-wits bleating to the empty sky for wits denied them—grew brave and full of strange resource.
If a farm-lad gathered a couple of lambs into his arms—twins, which Farmer Hirst had boasted of last night—the mother would grow manlike for the moment, would seek for a point of vantage and charge him down. When Priscilla—loved by all four-footed folk, and by most of the two-footed kind—when Priscilla gathered a lamb into her arms, to carry it down to the fold, it was the same. There was panic among these bleak-witted ewes; and, like all dreads, it brought out some hidden source of courage.