“Thanks to you shepherds. What fool’s tale did you come telling, about north wind and snow?” put in Geordie Wiseman, sauntering to join them from a neighbouring farm lane.
“Bide a day or two, and you’ll learn. For myself, I’m glad of a breathing-time, while Scamp yonder takes ’em home to Logie.”
“You haven’t a pup of his fathering, Brant?”
“I have, as it happens, but I’d never trust him to your lowland training,” growled Brant.
The shepherd fell into great moodiness, till Michael rallied him.
“What’s gone amiss?”
“Storm’s gone amiss,” snapped Brant. “Scamp does well enough—a good second of the twins I reared—but Storm was known from this to Carlisle for what he was—the best dog in the north for sheep. And now he’s tasted flesh, and no cure for him but the barrels of a gun.”
“A rare dog,” assented Wiseman, “but too clever, as you might say. He went past himself. You’ve not chanced on him yet, I take it?”
“Not I. I begin to fancy he’s savaging another man’s flocks by now.”
Storm, if they had known it, was watching them from above, where he lay coiled in a clump of bracken under Pengables. For a week and a day, since Hardcastle first gave him house-room, he had roamed at large, raiding and sleeping and skulking by turns; and, as he came warily across the moor this morning, the uproar from the fells below roused ancient memories. With slow craftiness, his body crouched to take advantage of such cover as rocks and heather gave him, he had wormed his way to the foot of Pengables, and now looked on, an outlaw, at the work speeding forward.