The ranks closed up again as the pack tumbled back sadly into the road. Kilgour was a true prophet; they were bent at last towards that unfailing harbour. On they pushed, up hill and down, through a grey village where the trees shut out the sky from the winding street, and then slap in at a gate that let them on to the grass again.
"Where are we?" asked Susan, as she was squeezed in the press through the gate, finding elbow-room as her neighbours scattered on the other side, spreading downward.
"On the wild side of Ranksboro'," said Barnaby. "Stick to me if you are thinking of getting lost. You'll see where you are when we reach the top, and you can look down on the cover;—but that's at the other side. Don't you remember the black look of it on the hillside, off the Melton and Oakham road?"
All were hurrying across the rough bottom, with its hillocks and furze bushes, and patches of withered bracken; then, gathering in the narrow bit that let them in under a fringe of trees, mounting upwards. On the farther side of the summit they came out above a thick plantation; and there they drew rein and waited, unsheltered, bare to the sky overhead.
Down came the rain.
"I wish I was dead," said a lank man behind Kilgour. "I wish I was fighting a bye-election!"
Those who were near huddled into the bristling hedge that might break an east wind, but was useless against this downpour. A few slunk back over the brow, and herded under the trees; the rest sat stubbornly on their horses, humping their shoulders, their dripping faces set grimly towards the cover below; hearkening to hounds.
"Would you rather be pelted with words?" said Kilgour, ramming his hat over his nose.—"Surely they trickle off you.... Jerusalem! we'll be drowned."
The lank man turned up his collar, feeling for a button.
"Well, they are dry!" he said.