[CHAPTER I
BETHESDA]
A DULL patter of sheep’s hurrying feet came from behind a small knoll that jutted into the track along the mountain. The level plateau was wide and smooth below the towering slopes, and the threads of water crossing it at intervals had laid the underlying rock bare. As the sound neared, a travelling flock came round the knoll, herded thickly together and running before a man on horseback like clouds scudding before a gale. Forty pairs of light-coloured eyes, with their clear black bar of pupil, stared limpidly into space, and the backs of the flock bobbed and heaved as the hundred and sixty little cloven hoofs set their mark on the earthy places over which they passed.
Heber Moorhouse, pressing hard on their heels, shouted now and again, swinging the rope’s end he carried and leaning far out of his saddle as he drove the stragglers in. The rough-coated, weedy-looking pony under him cantered on, stubborn in face and obedient in limb to the rider’s hand and balance. ‘Black Heber’ could bring in his sheep as easily without his dog as with him.
It was nothing in his colouring that had earned him the title by which some spoke of him, for his hair was of the same indefinite shade as that of many of his neighbours, and his eyes were rather light than dark. But they had a fire, on occasion, that suggested dark things even to the ardent and sober Baptist community to which he belonged. Though he was a young man he looked older than his years by reason of his gauntness and his thin beard. He had sole charge of the flock on a fair-sized sheep farm, and was counted by his employer a responsible, if inconveniently independent, fellow. He was a convinced chapel-goer, rather bigoted and with qualities which made certain wildnesses in him doubly marked by contrast.
He looked wild enough this afternoon, with his battered, wide-brimmed hat and the arm which swung the rope-end showing sharply against the sky. He was a figure which by no stretch of imagination could be supposed to belong to the valley lying below his feet, rich, chequered, and green; its soft luxuriance pertained to another world from that which had given birth to this crude son of action.
The afternoon was wearing on and he was anxious to get the crowd in front of him to its destination in a pen farther along the plateau; when the sheep were off his hands there would be other matters calling him, and his mind was running on far before the flock.
Meanwhile, as he rode on the mountain turf, a little concourse of people waited about among the trees at the head of the dingle farther on. Where a primitive cart-road plunged through a grove of alders, a two-storied house, scarcely more pretentious than a cottage, stood back from it, facing the passer-by and parted from him by a wide yard. An obliterated signboard, high on the rough-cast wall, showed that the building had formerly been a house of entertainment, while it offered no clue to the device it had once borne, nor suggested the name, “Bethesda,” by which it was now known. What gave the place significance was the stream of water which crossed the road on its downward course and dived in among the trees, falling from level to level, and disappearing in the thicket of hazels and undergrowth.