“He is catching salmon. Not a fish has a chance up here on the moor. What a parcel of rascals there be!”
Pepperill drove across the bridge. He had intended—he hardly dared articulately to express to himself his intention. Again he was frustrated—just at a suitable point—by this fellow catching salmon by night.
Beyond the bridge the road rose rapidly. Both uncle and niece were forced to descend from the cart, and relieve the horse. Some six hundred feet had to be mounted without any zigzags in the road. Kate walked along cheerily. Pasco lagged behind. The horse, with nose down, laboriously stepped up the steep incline. Pasco took out his knife and cut a branch of thorn from the hedge, and in doing so tore his fingers. He put the thorn behind the seat.
When the summit of the hill was almost reached, he said to Kate, “I shall turn to the left, and leave the road.”
“What—out on the moor?”
“Yes; I think we can cut off a great curve and avoid the cottages. You walk by the horse’s head; I will mount and hold the reins. There are large stones in the way.”
This was the case. Kate thought that her uncle was rash in taking the track across the moor at night, a way he could not know, merely to save a mile that the road made in detour. But she said nothing. She was pleased to go by a way that commanded the gorge of the Dart, and had no fear, as the moon shone brilliantly, and every bush and stone was visible as in the day. The mica and spar in the granite made each rock sparkle as though encrusted with diamonds. A heavy dew had fallen, cobwebs hanging on the furze were as silvery fairy tissue.
Rabbits were out sporting, feeding, darting away with a gleam of snowy tail when alarmed. Owls were flitting and hooting in the ravine. The wind from the east hummed an Æolian strain in the moor grass and heather.
The moon rose high above all obstruction to its placid light, and Kate breathed slowly, and in the chill air her breath came away as a fine shining vapour. Every now and then the cob struck out a red fire-spark from the stones against which his shoe struck. Kate held the reins at the bit, and paced at his head, her heart swelling with happiness, as she drank in the loveliness of the night, till she was so full of the beauty that her eyes began to fill. Pasco Pepperill was silent. He was knotting the thorn-branch to his whip. His eye was on her.
Presently the track on the turf ran at the edge of a steep slope. Rocks from a tor overhead had fallen and strewn the incline, and formed fantastic objects in the moonlight, casting shadows even more fantastic. A sheep that had been sleeping under one of the rocks started up and bounded away. The spring of the sheep close beside him alarmed the horse, and he started back, plunged, and dragged Kate off her feet.