“Yes, Dick?”
“Brant would have found the Logie Men ready enough to muster, if we’d been lost that day. They’ll have to muster now, and we’ll make an end of the swine-styes yonder, once for all.”
From the strength of their great caring, from the very heart of her bridal pride, joy quickened in Causleen. Better war, savage and instant, than to go through another stealthy siege at the hands of Garsykes.
“Break them outright, Dick,” she said. “For my sake, break them.”
They rode up and further up into the wide-flung spaces of the fells. No woodland birds sang here. That lowland litany of joy was out of hearing. Instead, there came the wheeling cries of hawk and plover, red-shank and snipe and hoodie-crow—battle-music, swift as a pibroch, keen as the thin, nipping wind that fought the glaring sun-heat.
Past Lone Rigg Cross they went—which marked the graves of a lad found dead in some far-off winter’s gale—and up raking Skircarl Rise, till they drew rein again to give their sweating nags a rest.
They were on the roof-top of the Dale now, Moorland and gaunt pastures, gashed by wild ravines, raked to the further mountains, grey-blue in the distant, shimmering haze—a haze so drifting that it was hard to know Pen-y-Gent’s long, sloping crest or Ingleborough’s bluff, upstanding bulk.
“A good land, to live or die for,” said Hardcastle, all his love for this far-striding homeland finding voice.
Reluctant to go, they gathered the reins at last and were moving forward at a lagging pace when a traveller came up from the Norbrigg side, over the steep brink of the hill. He was so tall and lean, so quick and yet so stumbling in his stride, that they wondered who he was, and how he came there. The one moving thing on this lone, empty road, he seemed forlorn, and yet gigantic.
The man stopped as he neared them and touched a greasy cap. “D’ye know a place called Garsykes?” he asked. “It should be somewhere near by now.”