Hardcastle did not know himself in this mood. His fore-elders were intent about him—brave, brawny folk who compassed Logie, a regiment of fighting men. And so in great heart he climbed the hill, and came to his gate, and found a message scrawled in chalk.
Hemlock grows in the Wilderness.
That was all, till he tried to open the gate, and felt a weight against it. He put an impatient shoulder to the topmost bar, and there inside lay Roy, a dead thing with no joy of welcome. Froth of the death-throes flecked his jaws and his gold-brown hide. He had watched for the Master faithfully, and for reward lay here.
A silence came to Hardcastle, and a great sickness—sickness of heart, that is the worst to bear. He could not believe for awhile that this comrade had gone before his time. He had reared him as a puppy—a ball of golden fluff that played strange antics—had nursed him through distemper and trained him to the gun. As if he stood at the graveside of a familiar friend, long thoughts went racing down the years. He recalled the very smell of the heather when grouse swept cluttering up the moor, the crisp, frosty silence as they waited for the wild-duck to come over. They had roused all Logie-land together, good weather and foul, and had tramped home with happy weariness.
The trouble went deep. Roy had slept outside his bedroom door, had been the first to welcome him when he got up for the day’s business, the last to wag his tail in token of good-night. And Roy had gone. His body was here—but what of the eager spirit, the loyalty that never faltered, the eyes that spoke because the tongue was dumb? Many had failed Hardcastle in his time, but never Roy.
No longer since than yesterday, Roy had been with him up the pastures, and now he was away to some far land. What land? With the question came a swift, wayward hope that he had found moors out yonder, and birds rising to the gun, and wind among the brackens—a faith that they would rejoin each other later on, when his time came to die.
Nothing could ease grief of this sort but remembrance of the second token on his gate. Hemlock grew in the Wilderness, and they had poisoned the thing he loved best in the world—the friend that Nita, weaving her basket where the Brigg crossed Crooning Water, had told him would be waiting. And now little, crimson lines began to dance before his eyes, and widened swiftly till he saw nothing but a sheet of fiery red, and behind it the styes where the Lost Folk housed themselves. It was battle-sunrise, drinking up the fears of generations; and many never had known it, from Flodden’s day to this.
Causleen, spent with watching by the long-settle where her father lay in deep sleep at last, had come out for a breath of this clean, upland air. She would go to the gate, and a little beyond, maybe—but not far away from the sick man who might need her at any moment.
She got no further than the gate. Her sympathy was quick for dogs; and, seeing Roy there in all his dead, silent disarray, she knelt beside him and hid a sudden rush of tears in the coat that had been warm yesterday, when he growled at her coming and afterwards gave friendship.
“He was so brave and bonnie—and he’s gone,” she said, glancing up between wet lashes.