As the chestnut padded softly along the track home to Steve's, Deirdre wondered again what effect Donald Cameron's death would have on Davey and Dan. It would make Davey a rich man, she knew. Donald Cameron had been reputed wealthy when she and the Schoolmaster first came to the hills, and he had not been drinking long enough to have squandered much money. "It would take more than a gallon of rum to make old Cameron loosen his purse strings," she remembered having heard Conal say.
To Dan and to her it would make very little difference in the end. There would still be McNab. The train of her thought snapped. For a moment, with all her passionate youth, she envied Donald Cameron his stillness.
A night and a day remained before she would have to tell McNab that she had made her choice. Every beat of the chestnut's hoofs on the soft roadside drove what he had said into her brain. She knew no more now than she did a week ago what was going to happen to Davey and the Schoolmaster, or how the case was going. Perhaps less, since Donald Cameron's death. But her mind was made up as to what McNab's answer would be. She had never really had any doubt as to what it must be, and had asked for time as one asks to have the window open before settling down to passing the day in a dark and airless room.
Deep in her mind there was still, however, a vagrant hope, a fairy, child-like thing, a phantom assurance of the impossibility of what was demanded of her, a belief, like thistle-down, as faint and fragile, that something unheard of, miraculous, would happen to help her, and at the same time save Dan and Steve and Davey.
CHAPTER XLIII
The big kitchen was very quiet. The log that had been smouldering on the open hearth all day broke. Deirdre swept back the scattered embers and thrust the broken ends of wood together. Flames leapt over them, lighting the room.
They penetrated the shadows that bulked, huge and shapeless, at the end of it, revealing a hoard of store casks and boxes piled almost to the roof and half-cloaked with hessian bags sewed together. The barrel of a rifle slung on the walls glimmered for a moment; the firelight showed stirrup irons and miscellaneous harnessing gear, halters and bridles hung over a peg near the door, a couple of horse-shoes nailed to it, and two or three hams in smoke-blackened bags with bunches of herbs beside them, strung up to the rafters.
A tallow dip cast a halo of garish light about Deirdre where she sat sewing; a broad gleam touched the crockery on the shelves behind her. The high-backed arm-chair in which Steve lay, slack and nodding drowsily, was drawn up before the fire.
The door to the bar, reached by a step from the kitchen, was open. A dip burned on the bench there, too, giving the dingy windows of the shanty a gleam for wayfarers. It was a wild night; the wind blowing from the south-west beat against the doors and rattled the windows of the frail building. The doors were all shut though it was still early.