“Death, I fancy; but we’re together.”
Her hand tightened its grip. He was altogether hers, and this evil road they took tested his caring at every turn.
Both forgot Storm, till a whimpering came from the far side of the stream. Fearless in a score of ways, the look of the narrow bridge, wet in the candlelight, daunted him. Time after time he tried to foot it and withdrew, afraid of the cauldron underneath.
Hardcastle gave the flickering candle to Causleen, and crossed the bridge again, and took Storm on his shoulders, telling him to cease wriggling unless he meant to overbalance both.
She watched that crossing, short as it was, as if its length reached through an eternity of suffering. Storm’s bulk was no light burden for a man treading slippery rocks. At every step Hardcastle blundered and recovered—blundered so wildly over the last of the crossing that he had to take a sheer leap across the torrent, to land safely on the further brink.
He shook Storm from his shoulders, and cuffed him soundly. “There’s no room here for fools, my lad,” he grumbled. “Why could you not keep still?”
Storm pressed against him with mute penitence, and after the Master had stayed to get his breath again the three went forward. The ground underfoot was so broken now that Hardcastle kept the candle burning, and by its light they saw presently that they had come to a place of skulls—human skulls, grinning from a tangled heap of bones. They lay in a circle to the right of the track, where it widened for a space, and they were no good sight for folk oppressed already with a sense of doom.
“How could they harm us?” said Hardcastle, with harsh levity. “They’ve been dead too long for that.”
Yet, while he spoke, Storm began to shiver as with ague. His limbs refused their work, and his bristling hide was dank with sweat. Causleen, her Highland other-sight stirred suddenly, was next aware that they stood in an underworld of ghosts, till Hardcastle himself was shaken, remembering many legends that were rife about the moorside.
“Come away,” he said, gripping Storm by the collar and dragging him by force beyond the peopled silence.