The Master stepped quietly in front of Widow Mathison, and they swayed and jostled, eager to attack, but held for a moment by brutish fear of his unconcern. In that moment the moon was snapped up by a scudding cloud, and Hardcastle took his luck as it came.
His one hope of defence was to attack. Without a pause he ran forward, lifting the stout stick he carried, and smashed the lanterns one by one. Then, in the dark of his own making, he rained blows at random into the midst of the screaming throng.
Luck could not hold for long, he knew. Already the cloud was passing, and with clearer light would come the end for him. But meanwhile it was good to be alive, drawing healthy music from Garsykes skulls.
When the moon raced free again, it shone on a few fallen men, on others who yelped like wolves and came at him headlong. He glanced about him, ran nimbly to a corner where two field-walls protected him from rear attack, and waited for them. A man had to die once and some day. What better end could Logie ask of him?
II
Will o’ Wisp, lurking beside the track that Hardcastle would take from Broken Firs, wearied of his job. It had been well enough, with Nita beside him, to do her bidding; but the silence and the night-time sobered him. What grudge had he, after all, against the Master of Logie? The man had taken a random shot at him, long ago, when he tried to rob the post-boy. That was all in the day’s work of chance and mischance. But what of this lying in wait, cold-blooded, for a shot that could not miss its mark?
Will was a rogue by nature—and from choice because life offered more frolic along unlicensed roads. Yet decency, of his own sort, travelled all roads with him, like a faithful comrade, and the longer Hardcastle tarried in his coming, the chillier grew this enterprise of waiting to shoot a man as if he were a sitting rabbit.
What had he heard in the Garsykes tavern? That Nita played with men as cats play with mice—that the way of her with them all was one and the same—and the end a long sliding down the slope to hell. They did not mince matters in their talk, the Garsykes Folk, and Will o’ Wisp thought of these things now.
Still Hardcastle did not come down the moor. Nita had pretended to know the way he would take to-night, the hour of his return. She was wrong, it seemed, and the rogue felt a stealthy gladness. The breeze sobbed and fluted through the naked spinney where he crouched. His gun lay chilly in half-frozen hands. Were they right when they spoke of the little basket-weaver as of a thing accursed?
He was too far on the Logie-side of the moor to hear the cries that had drawn Hardcastle from his home-track past the spinney; and at length he gave up the errand that had brought him here.