“Roy needs no praise,” growled Hardcastle, roughened by his loss. “If you’d known him as I did, you’d let your tongue be still.”
Her pride took fire. From the first he had been surly and resentful of her coming. Yet her feet dragged, as she left him with his dead. She halted and glanced back; and there was Hardcastle, his shoulders bowed with sorrow.
“Ah, you cared for him,” she said, her voice low with pity.
“Cared? He was all left to care for, except Logie.”
CHAPTER VI
THE EWE-GATHERING
They were gathering their sheep from the fells under Pengables, to bring them down into the warmer lands below. To a stranger it would have seemed odd that so many shepherds, and master-farmers with their hinds, should have chosen the same day. The farmers, indeed, might have done the work at haphazard, choosing a time here and there as occasion served; but their shepherds lived nearer the fell-tops where true weather-lore was taught by countless little signs and tokens. And the shepherds had decreed that within eight-and-forty hours the wind hounds of the north would be driving snow before them.
The Logie country, if it guessed what was to come, made merry with the time left it. Quiet wisps of cloud lay bosomed on a sky of blue. The belt of woodland under Pengables—larches, pines and rowans, their feet set deep in the heather—glowed in the hot sun glare with rich array of russet and amber, and wide-flung crimson—the riot of it all subdued by the still majesty of the pines, who kept their burnished livery secure against all onset of the seasons.
All the land was filled with uproar—dogs barking their throats hoarse, sheep crying witless and forlorn, men cursing ewes and dogs and neighbour-folk in rich upland speech. When each shepherd had only his own ewes to look after, and his own dog to work them, they went silently about the business, save for a whistle or a quiet call. But now the dogs were mad with rivalry. The sudden busy-ness of these quiet fells was to them what market day in Shepperton meant to the shepherds when they went there once in a while and were amazed by the town’s confusion.
Shepherd Brant, a great leader of dogs and ewes, began at last to get order out of havoc, and all was going well when Michael Draycott—he that was lying on his death-bed a fortnight since, till Hardcastle persuaded him to get out of it—came driving a flock of three-score down the lane the bracken-sledges took. They came plump into a company that Brant was shepherding along the track to Logie, and a bleak-witted cry went up to heaven from two hundred sheep that turned all ways at once.