“Will you not come, widow?” she asked. “There’ll be such sport as was never seen.”
“I’m too fat, I tell you. I should sweat myself to death in climbing.”
“More’s the pity, for you’d look on at what men long dead in Garsykes hungered to see. It was left to little Nita to bring Logie down.”
Then she mocked the widow’s grossness, and went up the breast of the fells. And Widow Mathison got heavily to a spur of the rising ground that gave her a better outlook on the caves. She remembered how Hardcastle had brought her lad from the wet of the slimy marshes and given him back to her on a night not long gone by. Nothing could ever bridge that debt she owed him.
She listened to the roar of Garsykes voices, saw Nita going tireless up the slope; and the tears ran amain down the furrows of her plump, good-natured face.
“We could spare most on Logie-side,” she sobbed, “but not its Master.”
CHAPTER XXI
THE POOL
Hardcastle had gone into the black jaws of the cave without pause or thought of what ambushes might lie in wait. Causleen was here, and nothing mattered till he reached her. What he had suffered, since first he declined to give tribute, was child’s play measured by the agony of question that drove him forward. Causleen was somewhere in the gloom ahead. He was sure of finding her—yes, but in what evil plight? With that thought came crimson bands of flame that danced ahead. Nita would have found vengeance sweet almost to cloying if she had been with him in this hour.
Storm pressed close against him as he went with lighted candle along the narrow track, turning his head constantly to escape the dripping limestone spears that menaced from the roof.