“You’re frank,” said Hardcastle, shrugging his wide shoulders. “It seems a long way off, Nita—the time when you would come and make a day hell or heaven for me. You chose your road.”
Now she had lost him; she recalled with bitter clearness the way of her playing with him long since, because he was so big and yet so downright drowned in love. All the might-have-been turned to venom, though she had caged her temper and was smiling in quiet mockery.
“Yes,” she said—“as you chose your road yesterday. The Wilderness Men you taunted me with just now—I keep them at bay by promising favours to one and another, and by giving none. When danger gets too close, I set them at each other’s throats—for your sake, until now.”
“For my sake?”
“Men know so little.” Her glance met his in search of weakness or relenting, and found none. “So now I shall set them all at your throat, Hardcastle of Logie, and they’ll bring blithe hearts to the game. You know what follows the token left on a gate? There comes a shaft out of nowhere, aimed at Logie. Then a spell of quiet, and after that another shaft. You’ve heard the way of the Lost Folk?”
“I have,” said the Master, his head lifted sharply. “And now the Lost Folk are to learn the way of Logie.”
Nita warmed to the change in this man who had been easy going once, a slave to her whims. And with the warmth came a new bitterness that she had lost one who could show this spirit, walking alone as he did so near the Wilderness that soon would be eating into his courage like a cancer.
“You’ve a gun under your arm,” she said. “That’s for fear, I take it.”
“No. It’s for a chance shot at partridge on the way to Michael Draycott’s. He fancies he’s a day or two from death, and wants his will made out.”
“Men do fancy that, if they’ve the toothache or their little finger smarts. And of course you’re a magistrate these days.” The grey eyes enticed and mocked him. “I had forgotten. I was back, somehow, in the times when we roamed Logie Woods together.”