SPADEADAM WASTE
About eleven o'clock next morning Foster stopped at the top of a hill and sitting down on a broken wall lighted his pipe. In front, the undulating military road ran straight across the high tableland to the west. To the south, a deep hollow, the bottom of which he could not see, marked the course of the Tyne. Plumes of smoke rose out of the valley and trailed languidly across the sky, for the river flowed past well-cultivated fields, old-fashioned villages, and rows of sooty cottages that clustered round pithead towers. Human activity had set its stamp upon the sheltered dale, alike in scenes of quiet pastoral beauty and industrial ugliness.
It was different to the north, where the shaggy moors rolled back in bleak, dark ridges. There were no white farmsteads here; one looked across a lonely waste that had sheltered the wolf and the lurking Pict when the Romans manned the Wall, and long afterwards offered a refuge to outlaws and cattle thieves. Foster's way led through this desolation, but his map indicated a road of a kind that ran north to the head of Liddel. He must decide whether he should take it or plunge into the wilds.
Since Graham was in front of him, he had probably gone to Liddesdale, with the object of finding if Foster was at the Garth. If he did not come back by the road he had taken, he would watch the railway that roughly followed it across the moors from Hexham, which seemed to close the latter to Foster and make it dangerous for him to go near the Garth at all. Nevertheless he meant to see Alice before he looked for Daly, and he turned to Pete.
"On the whole, I'd sooner keep off the road. Is there a way across the heath to the upper Liddel?"
"I wouldna' say there's a way," Pete answered with a dry smile. "But I can take ye ower the Spadeadam waste, if ye do not mind the soft flows and some verra rough traiveling. Then I'll no' promise that we'll win farther than Bewcastle to-night, an' if there's much water in the burns, we'll maybe no' get there."
They struck across a rushy field, crept through a ragged hedge, and came out upon rough pasture that gradually merged into the heath. A green bank and a straggling line of stones, some fallen in large masses and some standing two or three feet high, presently stretched across their path, and Foster stopped for a few moments. The bank and moat-like hollow he looked down upon marked the vallum; the squared stones, to which the lime still clung, apparently undetachable, the murus. He was looking at the great rampart a Roman emperor had built. He understood that it was higher and less damaged farther west and would have liked to follow it, but he had something else to think about than antiquities.
The heath got rougher when they left the wall. Spongy moss grew among the ling that caught their feet, and the ground began to rise. Looking at the sun, Foster saw they were not taking as northerly a line as he had expected, but the back of a bold ridge rose between them and the west and he supposed Pete meant to follow its other side. They stopped to eat the food they had brought where a stream had worn away a hollow in a bank. The sun, striking the wall of peaty soil behind them, was pleasantly warm. It was a calm day, with slowly-drifting clouds, and gray shadows streaked the wide, brown waste.
There was no house in sight and only in one place a few scattered dots that looked like sheep. Getting out his map, Foster noted that they were crossing the high neck where the Pennine range slopes down to meet the southern spurs of the Cheviots. He had seen nothing in Canada wilder or more desolate than this bleak tableland.
In the afternoon they toiled up the rise he had noticed in the distance, winding in and out among soft places and hummocks of the peat, but when they came to the top there was not the dip to a valley he had expected. The ground was rougher than before, and the moor rolled on, rising and falling in heathy undulations. By degrees, however, it became obvious that they had crossed the water-shed and were descending, for streams that increased in size crossed their path. So far, none were deep, but the ravines they ran through began to seam the gradual slope and Foster understood Pete's remark that something depended on there not being much water in the burns.