Deep Moat Grange

by S. R. Crockett

The conclusion was, they would go in a body to Deep Moat Grange. Our registrar, Waldron, who was great on the instinct of animals, tried to get Dapple to retrace her steps. She was led out into the yard, and instantly retraced them into the stable.

At the Bridge End there was a halt. The heads of our Breckonsiders were no ways strong. Besides they were dazed with the sudden alarm.

The memory of poor Harry, the strange tales they had heard for the last ten years of vanished drovers, travellers seen on the moss and then vanishing in some hollow, like the shadow of a cloud, to be seen no more, weighed heavy upon them.

Then some fool cried out that Hobby Stennis had been often seen of late with his son Robin's daughter—meaning Elsie—and who knew?

Now, no one can ever tell what will seem reasonable to a crowd of such rustics as those about us. And, indeed, if it had not been for my mother—who strode out, and, even in her grief, raged upon them—asserting that Elsie was a good girl and should not be meddled with, I do believe that Nance Edgar's house would have been routed out from garret to hallan, to seek for the captors or assassins of my father.

The sound of many feet, the hoarse murmur of voices in angry discussion, and perhaps, also, the reflected light of many lanterns awoke both Nance Edgar and Elsie. But it was Elsie who was first down. "What is it?" she asked, standing in the doorway with a plaid about her shoulders, and her feet thrust into Nance Edgar's big, wooden-soled, winter clogs. "What has brought you out?"

I told her that my father had not returned from Longtown, but that some one had brought Dapple home, unlocked the door of the yard, and let in the mare—then relocked it and gone his way. I had quite forgotten—shame be to me—that of all this my mother had yet been told nothing. She stumbled where she stood a little before them all. A kind of hoarse cry escaped her lips, and it was into Elsie's arms that she fell. Perhaps it was as well. For in the rough and tumble of that dark, wintry campaign there was no place for women.

In a while Nance Edgar came out also, and she and Elsie soon got my poor mother into a comfortable bed. I had a word or two with Elsie. She would fain have come, making no doubt but that it was in the neighbourhood of that accursed house of the Moat Grange that my father, if, indeed, he were dead, had come by his end.

But I reminded her, first, that she was Hobby Stennis's own granddaughter. Also, she was a teacher in the local school, and, accordingly, leaving all else to one side, that she and I must not run the hills and woods as we had been in the habit of doing ever since she had come from Mrs. Comline's as a little toddling maid. Last of all, my mother would stay behind more contentedly if so be Elsie were with her.

Now it was a black frost, clean and durable. There had, of course, been considerable traffic over the moor road during the days of the Tryst at Longtown. So the feeble light of our lanterns in the winter morning could reveal nothing as to the means by which Dapple had reached home, nor yet who had brought her. Indeed, we were all more than a little dazed. It seemed such a terrible, unthinkable event, the loss of my father, that no one after him could feel secure. He had been the strongest among us, and if he had fallen to the knife of the secret criminal the only question in Breckonside was, Who was to be the next to go?