That night they waited in Garsykes village till the moon dipped over Scummer Rigg and grey-black gloom shrouded heath and pasture-land. Then every man who had strength to carry a burden reached out for his well-filled sack.
Long Murgatroyd came up the hill with his shammocky stride just as they were shouldering the sacks. He stood awhile in the lamp-glow streaming from the tavern windows, and they drew away from him as if he had the plague. There was something unearthly in his white, drawn face, in the laugh that broke his silence.
“So I’m in time, after all? It’s better pastime, this, than hanging yourself in Nita’s garter.”
The man still felt raw of a hempen cord about his neck—the cord that Hardcastle had loosed not long ago. Yet he laughed again, as he glanced from one to another. Once he had lain in wait for Hardcastle, and twice the Master had given him his life. The memory bit and rankled.
“Logie flares red as hell to-night,” he said. “Let’s make a start!”
They went out into a dark that could be felt, soon as the inn’s friendly gleam was left behind. It reared itself against them like a wall, so that they feared almost to break themselves against it. Then, as their eyes grew used to it a little, they picked their way across lean fields, over marshes yielding to the tread, through woods of pine and larch whose rustling blackness put slack fear into their limbs. But they dreaded more the open highway that gave them a ready way to Logie. Deep in the bones and fibre of the Lost Folk lurked distrust of roads where honest men might be encountered.
It was when they came to Logie Brigg that superstition gathered thick about them. They huddled together, a lack-luster mob, on their side of the crossing. It was a saying centuries old in Garsykes that luck never came of hindering a Hardcastle. They might rob or take tribute of Logie’s tenants, but must not touch its master.
“Bleating ewes, are you?” snarled Murgatroyd. “There’s all us—and up yonder only Hardcastle and two women, and an aged man who may be quick or stiff by now. And you bleat.”
A rough voice answered him through the murk of the windy night, over the song of Wharfe River as she raced below.
“It was you brought the trouble to Garsykes, when you were fool enough to wait for Hardcastle at the pinfold. There’s been naught but ill-luck since.”