They gathered courage from the exultation; and those who could press into the new cavern, formed to the left hand of the track, lifted a score of candles to what had been the end of their rock-fastness. The straight-faced barrier they had known was now a mad confusion of rocks broken into shapes fantastic, terrible.
“That’s their marriage-bed,” said Nita, her voice childest in its gentleness—“Hardcastle’s and his wanton’s. Did I say there’d be an end of Logie?”
“The man was always a bit of a fool,” growled Murgatroyd, recovering from his panic. “I reckon he loosed his fowling-piece on one o’ the two we trod on. A toddling Garsykes kid could have told him what it ’ud do to pent-in walls.”
When Nita, treading on light feet, led her men back through the cave, and out into the sweet upland air of afternoon, she took them straight to Widow Mathison’s inn, and left them there.
“Drink your fill, now Logie’s gone,” she said, and went up into the fells.
Near dusk she returned, and called them out from the ale that had merried them—called them into the cobbled street.
“Is Nita wise?” she asked softly. “Did she promise Logie’s end?”
They roared an answer, and suddenly she fell to dancing for their pleasure. The last crimson of the sunset flared down and over from Pengables Hill, and lit her slender paces and her slender limbs. As her fingers wove dark magic into the baskets she sold down and up the Dale, her whole body now snared and enticed the men she loathed.
Then once more she left them, going fleet-footed as a deer up the darkening fells, and came to her cottage where the little fir-wood rustled in the breeze. She slept as a tired child might, and soon after dawn went to her bath in the pool within the wood. Then she took the fell-track to Logie, and came to the open door of Rebecca’s kitchen, and stood there, darkening the wintry sunlight.
“The Master has not returned?” she asked softly.