They went past Ghyll House, where a dog barked at them from behind a stable-door, and up into the pastures.
Brant was right, no doubt, as Hardcastle had said. On one side of them, Pengables thrust his big rock shoulders up into the red sundown and the warmth; on the other a grey mist came running, like the ewes that Storm had chased into the Wilderness a few days since.
And now again there sounded the crying from above, shrill and terrible, and Causleen looked up to see what seemed a ship go overhead with the speed of a hurricane behind. It was a long, slender ship, its slenderer prow driving into the sunlit warmth ahead, and it was chased by the breeze that was a wind by now, hurrying the grey mists in front of it. Then Causleen came out of the eeriness that Logie Woods had laid on her.
“It’s the wild-geese flighting south,” she said, shaking herself free of omens.
“It is,” said Hardcastle; “and so many of them come that we’ve time to get to Logie and no more. Lord Harry only knows what sort of storm is skelping down.”
They two knew what sort of storm it was, when they reached the long pasture that raked up into the Logie highroad. The wind came, and the snow, and biting hail—came ravening on the track of the wild-geese fleeing south—and soon there were no landmarks.
There was a foresters’ hut, he remembered, at his left hand, where the field ran into the pinewoods. They could find shelter there, if anything could find it.
Hardcastle had known the pasture from childhood, but it was lost to him as if he trod foreign country. In the blackest night he could have found his way across it, but not through this scudding snow that swirled till it dizzied brain and sight—through the wind that bit and the hail that stung.
He was not making now for Logie. There was a foresters’ hut at the far end of the pasture where it met the pinewoods. Once he could find it they could shelter till the snow had ended; for tempests as quick to come as this, out of a warm October’s quiet, seldom lasted.
He could not find the hut—could find nothing but snow that was balling already under his feet—snow that would not let the sky come through. It was as if he tried to make way through a thicket, not of brambles, but of cotton-wool. Then a cry reached him. Whether it came from front or rear, he could not tell, but it was Causleen’s voice.