When he roused himself, his hold on this world seemed gone. He looked out before him as if no house-walls and no leagues of foreign country hid the wild glens of Inverness. He was home again.
“I had two dreams,” he said, his voice clear and lusty. “One was to know Causleen safe, and that comes true. The other was a sick man’s fancy. I dreamed”—he tried to lift himself, and failed—“dreamed that I died a warrior, instead of Pedlar Donald.”
With that his eyes closed, and Rebecca, coming to see how it went with him, stood beside the settle, her grim face softened.
“Sleeps like a babby, poor soul—and it would be as well if he died in it, instead of living to be bumped on a bracken-sledge to-morrow. Brant sits snug by my hearth, and tells me you’re for turning the old man out o’ doors.”
“The Garsykes Men are coming. He’s safer up the moor.”
“His brat is safer, you mean. Why don’t you want to tuck me, too, on the sledge, if Logie is no place for women? D’ye think that, because I’ve a face like a hatchet, to scare men with, I’ve a heart after the same pattern? Ask the lad that keeps tryst with me at the gate, every night and all.”
She lowered the lamp, took another look at Donald as if he were an ailing first-born of her own, and together they went out into the draughty hall.
Storm yapped and whimpered from his cupboard, and Hardcastle went in to quiet him, thinking only of the dog’s peril, not of Logie’s.
“There’s Brant near by,” he said.
Storm would not be satisfied. He bared his teeth and growled till Hardcastle cuffed him. Then the sheep-slayer shivered and lay down—but not for fear of Brant—and whined, as the rising breeze about the house sobbed from the lost Garsykes lands.