He was sick with defeat. He had carried his head high above the Garsykes challenge, had gone through peril of the roads by night and day. And this was the finish of it all.
Causleen’s hand gripped his with instant sympathy, answering his mood. “Logie’s honour still goes safe,” she said.
“It still goes safe,” was all he answered.
The track wound downward now, till it turned sharply, and Causleen gave a stifled cry. They had come to the brink of a lake whose waters glinted smooth and glossy in the candlelight. The silence they had passed through seemed almost friendly, compared with the nether dumbness of this pool, deep beyond knowledge, windless, asleep with its living and its dead.
A strange beguiling came about them. Once again they knew what Nita had meant when she spoke of their death by hunger—or the ghosts. The pool called them, though the silence was unbroken. Hands reached out to draw them down, though they saw none. And Storm stood whimpering like a child.
Hardcastle, by sheer sweat of will, drew Causleen—and himself—from the alluring depths.
“It’s the end of our journey, when worst comes to worst,” he said.
“Tell me, Dick. It is better I should know—just all.”
“They’ll creep on us, soon or late. And they shall not have us, child. The pool is cleaner than the Garsykes sort.”
He led her over the broad causeway bordering the lake, and as they neared its end she looked down and recoiled. Hardcastle, following her glance, saw a stirring of the waters that gathered strength till wavelets licked the rock-track, and mounted till they broke across their feet. The flickering light showed them a great, sinewy back that threshed itself to fury. They glimpsed for a moment the face of something half fish, half devil, and Hardcastle himself recoiled now, drawing Causleen close against the wet precipice. He was in the grip of a cavern that sheltered primeval ghosts and age-old, living things, and the heart went out of him for one sick moment.