Murgatroyd nodded with rough friendliness. “Garsykes is just the spot for you. You can do as you like, all up and down the country-side, and nobody dare catch you at it.”
“I heard as much in gaol. So I stepped over and down, and here I am.”
Murgatroyd stirred uneasily as a little snatch of song drifted down the street, and Nita Langrish came picking her way daintily through the garbage and the litter.
She stopped at the sight of the stranger. Hope never died in her that one day a strong man would come from over the hill and help her lead her wastrels up to Logie for the last, big fight.
Murgatroyd watched her trying to weave filmy spells about this new arrival—watched with the old, half-slumbering lust to take her beauty by the throat and end it—with the old, indolent zest, too, in seeing yet another fall into her toils.
The stranger was past blandishment. All that York gaol had done to him, all the road-sores under his feet and the drumming anguish in his brain, seemed doubled now that the need to keep going no longer spurred him on.
He fumbled for his pipe and moleskin pouch, and with them drew from his pocket a flint arrow-head that tinkled on the cobble-stones. He did not heed, but Nita saw it lying there and drew back as from a thing she feared.
“Where did you find it?” she asked, her voice harsh and shrill.
“That?” said the vagabond, glancing down. “I’d forgotten it. It was given me by a big chap, striding a big horse. He told me to carry it to Garsykes.”
He lit his pipe with shaking fingers, pulled fiercely at it for awhile, then threw it down and lay back on the bench. The sweat dripped from him. His lean body was shaken as with palsy, and his face was red and ashen-grey by turns.