“How will it end, shepherd?”
“As it will end. What can I tell you more than that?”
The Wilderness Men were still halting, for Storm’s long-drawn howl had taken a deeper note. They looked for some ghostly death to overtake them, till Jake rallied their oozing pluck.
“It’s naught. We live too near those durned old miners up at Weathersett, with their talk of trolls and weir-dogs——”
“Aye, but it’s Guytrash calling us, all the same,” broke in a lad of the company. “I heard him once, and my father hanged himself that night.”
“The more fool he,” laughed Jake. “He’d have been hanged any way, soon or late; but no man should run to meet a halter.”
Hardcastle, fronting them at the bridge, knew that the odds must overmaster himself and Brant, once these folk came at them in dead earnest. They were thirty paces away as yet, irresolute for a moment that seemed endless, and Hardcastle’s thoughts ran swiftly, like those of a drowning man. This end was better, after all, than the long-drawn-out stealthy warfare he had been prepared to meet. And Logie’s honour would be safe. Yet he felt an odd, wistful regret for Brant the shepherd. The pity of it that Brant was old, with a heart reared on upland solitude. The fights he was trained to share were clean battles between a man and such weather as the skies chose to ding about his ears. But they were here together and must face it out.
Brant’s thoughts were busy, too, in this long moment of inaction. The deep, running cry, that sounded ceaselessly through the brackens up above, was a cry known to him. It had roused him many a night as he slept in his hut, up yonder on the roof of the high fells, had got him out of doors with a gun in his hand to follow a useless hunt in the dark for a sheep-slayer who yapped and growled across the wastes. He knew Storm’s voice now, as one knows the voice of his dearest enemy.
The ewes behind him knew it, and pressed together in a sweat of fright. Storm the sheep-slayer was among them once again—Storm, who had made nightmares of their slumber for time out of mind.
Then Hardcastle’s voice sounded, rough and sturdy, as he answered Jake’s gibe that no man should run to meet a halter.