The yelping cries were mingled now with fierce, tortured howls that guided him, step by step, to a clump of brackens where something lay and writhed, beating down the shelter it had sought in need. The moon shone clear through the leafless branches of the silver-birches overhead—shone on a dog’s bloodshot eyes and hairy face.
“Why, Storm, what ails you?” asked Hardcastle.
For a moment the sheep-slayer knew him and strove to wriggle to his hand; then his wounds were rawed again by the wind. He yelped and growled by turns when Hardcastle approached and felt down his body to find what limbs were broken; and suddenly a madness seized him. He bit at the hands that touched his wounds. All of him that was unmaimed was quick for attack. Hardcastle, to him, was Shepherd Brant, who had pursued him with a hate that would not let him rest—Brant, who had put gunshot into him at last.
Hardcastle had found the second ambush, after all, and one hard to meet. He strove with Storm, his hands bitten to the bone. This sheep-killer had come in time of need, when he scattered the Garsykes Men awhile since. There was a big debt owing by the house of Logie.
Then Storm’s strength was spent. He let the Master shoulder him, a dead-weight of weariness, and carry him to the horse tethered to the thorn-tree. The horse neighed and fidgetted as Hardcastle lifted Storm to the saddle, and held him there.
“Get up to Logie,” he said. “There are all jobs in a day, even for a thoroughbred.”
III
Causleen, wandering restlessly about Logie House, heard Shepherd Brant come into the kitchen with news that he had shot Storm at last. She heard, too, Rebecca’s talk of danger to the Master on his way from Norbrigg; and her restlessness increased.
Storm had found no more than his due, perhaps; but she had made a comrade of the shaggy culprit, and it seemed a cruel death for any dog. So little friendship came her way. She would miss his stealthy coming to the cupboard under the stair, her own stealthy journeys to the larder in search of a bone for him.
Then, struggle with the feeling as she might, she began to share Rebecca’s fears for Hardcastle. Suppose, in sober fact, he was lying somewhere on the Norbrigg road? Suppose his big, hale body would never ride the hill-crests again, or taste the savour of keen moorland weather? She felt the pity of it, and with pity came remembrance of the tempest they had shared. But for him, she would have died in the snow. That would have mattered little, for herself; to her father it would have meant an end of the last consolation left him.