"The young cockerels crow while the old birds fill their crops," laughed Nicholas. "Forward, lads, and mind well that none is to lay hand on Shameless Wayne till I have done with him."
Janet watched them move up into the moor, their figures, riding one behind the other, dark against the white, wind-hurried clouds.
"A fair journey, sirs!" she cried, soon as they were out of eyeshot. "A fair journey, and fair tempers when ye come back from slaying Wayne of Marsh."
Dangers were waiting in plenty for Ned, she knew; but it was enough that he was safe from the peril of the moment, and her heart sang blithely as she told herself that, but for her aid, the Lean Man would have gone to meet him yesterday—and would have found him. What she should say when they returned from their bootless errand, she knew not, nor whether her grandfather would suspect the truth of all the tale she had told him when he found one flaw in it. It did not matter; some way she would coax him back to good humour, as she had done four days ago.
Restless in her gaiety, which had a certain fierceness in it, she wandered up and down the house, and out into the garden, and thence to the stables in search of her favourite roan mare. The roan had been ailing lately, and this morning she turned a sadly lack-lustre eye on Janet in answer to the girl's caresses.
"'Tis time a leech looked to thee," said Janet, stroking the beast's muzzle. "Yet it is thankless of thee, when all is said, after the pains I've taken. I all but lost the fingers of one hand awhile since in giving thee a ball, and thou'rt not a whit the better for it. Well, we must see if Earnshaw, yond idle rogue from Marshcotes, can do thee any good; he's cunning at horse-physic, so they say."
Glad of the excuse for a scamper, but finding none of the farm-hands about the yard, she saddled the mare that stood in the next stall, led her to the horsing-steps that stood this side the gateway, and soon was galloping over the heather as if the chestnut had no knees to be broken, nor she a neck to lose. And half the way her thoughts were of the Ratcliffes, riding to meet a foe who would not come; and half the way she thought of Wayne's splendid doggedness, when she had met him at Hazel Brigg, and he had turned a deaf ear to her warning.
Mistress Wayne, meanwhile, had found the Sexton at work on a new grave and had enticed him to the flat stone which had grown to be their seat on all occasions when they foregathered for a chat. Thinner than ever was the Sexton, as if the past winter had dried the little flesh that had once made shift to clothe his bones; his eyes were dreamier, but the old kindliness was in them as they rested on this frail comrade who listened with such goodwill to all his thrice-told tales of fight and fairies, of Barguest and the Brown Folk.
"Ay, they live under th' kirkyard, do th' Brown Folk, as weel as farther out across th' moor," Witherlee was saying. "They're deepish down, but time an' time, when I'm nearing th' bottom of a grave, I can hear 'em curse an' cry at me, for they like as they cannot bide mortal men to come anigh 'em."
"Art thou never afraid of them, Sexton?" asked Mistress Wayne, her wide, questioning eyes on his.