For the first time since they set a token on his gate, the Master laughed, from his heart upward. Michael had salted the coming days with humour, and it went with him as he halted at the kitchen door, and saw inside a red-haired lass who was baking an apple-pie.
“The master is crying out for breakfast, Susan.”
She turned a scared face to him. “He was dying awhile since,” she stammered.
“He was; but now he’s alive again, like the rest of us. You’ll get used to these recoveries when you’ve been longer in the house.”
With that he was gone; and humour stayed with him as he went down the pasture and out into the highroad. Nita was finishing her basket when he reached the bridge that girdled Crooning Water, and she glanced at him with innocent, grey eyes.
“You are going home to Logie?” she asked. “You’ll have news of a friend there.”
Again old bitterness soured laughter and all else in Hardcastle. “The Wilderness teaches most trades, Nita. You’re for telling the future nowadays—silver in your parlour, and promise of a dark lady coming?”
“I’m for telling the present. The friend is no lady, dark or fair—and he’s waiting for you at the gate.”
Hardcastle forgot her, forgot even the sharp, slender plough she had driven across his life, breaking it up. He came to Logie Brigg, and feet of the marching men sounded in his ears as he strode up the hill to Logie. In their day fight was easy—march, and camp, and straightforward ding of blows when battle came—but this modern warfare thrust on him was a stealthy matter, hard to wage. The old days were better.
And now Hardcastle heard not only the tread of feet, but song of the battle-men as they went to whatever chanced. They did not pick their road, as he was asking to choose it now, did not fall to dreaming of warfare that had been. The ruts and the hardships had been different then; but the call to conquer them was the same.