“Now listen. I built this snug fortune o’ mine from naught at all, as you might say, and thrived on sheep and cattle, thinking of little else. But I wouldn’t have built it unless I’d payed tribute to the Lost Folk, same as my father did before me.”
“My own father never had that failing,” said Hardcastle, stating a fact and proud of it.
“The Wilderness was not so strong then. Staunch as he was, he’d have sung to another tune these days. They out-number us, I tell you.”
“He’d have sung to the same tune—but with a lustier voice because the odds were bigger.”
The apple-red was glowing again in Draycott’s cheeks. His fancied ailments were forgotten. “So you take no shame to spread fire and murder through the country-side?”
“I take pride for holding my own ground.”
“Aye, stubborn, like all you Hardcastles; but lord help me to guess where pride comes in.”
“What do you pay in tribute now? Twice what it was in my father’s time—and so on till you’d have been beggared, you tax-paying folk. That’s where pride comes in, Michael. I’m glad to have set war between this and the Wilderness.”
Michael Draycott was prone to coddle his fancied illnesses, but under the foible lay a heart quick to answer real trouble when it came. He got out of bed with a speed astonishing in a sick man no longer young, and stood there in his nightshirt, fronting Hardcastle.
“There’ll not be many with you among the lazy men of Logie—but there’ll be me for one. While I get my breeches on, will you pass word to the kitchen that I’m roaring for a meal?”