“Nita has hanged enough men in her garter,” he muttered, stretching his cramped limbs.
Then he went down and across the pastures, leaping a wall nimbly here and there, till he came near Garsykes and its tumult. He saw lanterns flitting like his namesake Will o’ Wisps about the pastures, heard Widow Mathison swing her tongue like a flail, and noisy voices answer to the lash.
It was all a mystery to him as he pressed forward, halting only when the clouds raced over from Pengables, hiding one step from the next. Through the stormy murk, as he listened, came a thunder-din of oaths, a pig-like screeching from men not used to bear pain silently.
The moon ran free again, and in the sharp, cold light he saw Hardcastle standing in the angle of two limestone walls, with half Garsykes yammering to be at him.
Will o’ Wisp had no liking for the village he had blundered into weeks ago. There were degrees of rascaldom, and his own feet went merrily on the margin of such deeps as Garsykes knew. Something in Hardcastle’s dour silence as he faced the rabble with uplifted cudgel—some liking, inborn in him, for a man meeting heavy odds, brought music into Will’s heart. Moreover, he was in mood to take sides with any man that Nita hated.
“What’s this, you Garsykes louts?” he asked.
They turned on him, ready to tear him to pieces instead of Hardcastle.
“Here’s Nita’s last favourite, Lord help him,” laughed Long Murgatroyd.
“He carries a fowling-piece, as it happens—and it’s loaded—and you’re a timid folk in Garsykes, unless all the luck’s in front of you. No, Murgatroyd, I wouldn’t stir a foot, if I was you. You’d find it a queer thing to be dead, with a charge of shot inside you instead of ale.”
Will o’ Wisp was himself. Free of Nita, free of cold-blooded murder up the moor, it tickled his fancy to be master of these folk—master too, of what would happen soon to Hardcastle.