"Ye shall na get it," he shouted. "It's nane o' yours. I paid good money for it ower the counter o' your ain shop!"
And he fled upward through the flames, which seemed to wrap him round without doing any harm. They seemed his element.
*****
As I say, Mr. Ablethorpe and I came just too late. We had seen from afar the burning house—at least, we had seen the "skarrow" in the sky—the Grange itself lying (as all the world knows) at the very bottom of Deep Moat Hollow, with the pond on one side and the woods all about.
But once on our way, we had made haste, as indeed had many another. However, we started earlier than the others, though my father, living as it were next door, was far before any of us. Indeed, had it not been for him—— Well, I will go on with my tale.
We rushed across the drawbridge, which, just as he had done, we found down. We followed him across the lily plots. Right in the middle Mr. Ablethorpe came a cropper. I was on the look-out. It was not the first time that I had played at hide-and-seek there in difficult circumstances, though never with the windows above crackling and the flames licking the ivy and dry Virginia creeper off the walls, and the smoke so thick that the landscape was almost blotted out by it.
I arrived, a little in front of the Hayfork Parson, on the threshold of the door of Deep Moat Grange. And that is why I was the first to welcome a pair of Lazaruses risen from the dead—one, a girl, apparently truly dead, held in the arms of the wildest and most savage man I had ever beheld, upon whose shoulder her head reclined, and in whose menacing right hand was a rough bar of iron, pointed like a chisel.
I think he did not see well. Or, coming out of all that strangeness of the night, and the smoor and choking swirl of the smoke, he did not know his own son. At any rate, he rushed at me with Elsie still in his arms and the iron bar uplifted.
But Mr. Ablethorpe interposed from the flank, and catching him about the waist, disarmed him.
"Mr. Yarrow!" he cried, "this is Joseph, your own son!"