Those chosen for the rear attack crept pad-footed round the yard, and piled their sacks against the kitchen door with frantic haste till the woodwork was hidden by a bulging load of fuel. They littered the stone porch with what bags were left, and fired them.
The blaze was so fierce and instant that they leaped back into the cool dark of the night, and waited for those in Logie to be burned in their beds, or to come through the flames for what waited them. And the first that those within-doors heard of trouble was Storm’s frenzied barking as he hurled himself against his cupboard-door, to break it through for Logie’s sake.
The Master lay for a moment between sleep and waking. One window of his room opened on the stable-yard, and below he heard the restless tread of feet, the crackling of flame. Grey, pungent smoke was drifting in already across his bed, and he sprang up with an odd sense of readiness—and of relief. What they had waited for was here at last, to be met and grappled with.
Brant, too, had heard the uproar, and they met at the stairway head and ran down together to the kitchen. Hardcastle was in shirt and breeches, donned hastily, and the shepherd made a queer figure, his beard splayed above the top of a woollen nightshirt that reached to his unlaced boots.
They glanced at each other in the light of the smouldering kitchen-fire.
“You’ve a fowling-piece, Master?” murmured Brant. “Better have chosen a likelier gun. From what I’d heard, I fancied they were coming—this night or the next.”
He broke off to listen to the roar of flame outside, to watch the door blister and gape open in wide rents.
“I borrowed a blunderbuss before I got up to bed,” he went on, in the same low voice, “and loaded it. It would make you laugh to know what I crammed into its muzzle—pebbles and rusty nails, and all kinds of winsome odds and ends.”
The door they were watching gaped wider, and great joy came to them, born of the house they loved. Without were fire and all the scum of Garsykes. Within were two leal men.
“The odds are with us, Stephen,” said Hardcastle, breaking a silence that seemed long. “When the door’s down, they’ll be in the glare, and we in darkness.”