“They find such in the caves behind their houses, they tell me,” said Donald.
“Aye, and lay them on the gates of honest men.” Hardcastle had come to grips with fear, as he had closed yesterday with the three men at the pinfold; but dread was a harder foe to meet. As he advanced it withdrew its phantom regiment, only to loose another on him from behind—quick, cold shapes that leaped on him and clung. This was the price asked of him for keeping Logie’s honour safe. He had given no tribute to the Lost Folk—would give none in the future—and already the creeping stealth of their revenge was with him.
“It’s a bleak thing to have at your door for ever, this hate of the Wilderness Men?” said Donald, watching him.
Hardcastle, whatever he was feeling, shut a trapdoor on it. His face was grim again, inscrutable. “A bleak thing, pedlar—but then I was reared on winter gales.”
Donald was aware, by some hidden gift that came to him at times, of much that was to come about the house of Logie. “This gale from the Wilderness is like to blow for a longish while.”
“Then I’ll have to weather it for a longish while, and so much for that.”
Something stirred in Causleen’s heart against her will. Hardcastle had given them a churlish welcome. He did not want them at his door, asked only to be rid of them; but resentment was dulled, because she had seen the sudden weakness of his fear, his hard recovery. She, too, had known the broken roads, the dread that walked by night. She, too, had made, day in and day out, her own hard recovery. They had this in common, she and the Master of Logie.
A clank of pattens sounded from the stable-yard, breaking a silence heavy with the sense of doom, and old Rebecca came into their midst, a lean, tall figure of a woman.
“Jacob, the farm-boy, said there was a pedlar here,” she croaked.
“There is,” said Donald, and in a twinkling unfastened his pack and laid its wares out in the moonlight that rode high and clear above the russet beeches.