No one answered.
“Who touched me just now? Who passed? Who slid past me?” His voice rose almost to a scream.
Then, shaking off his wife, he swung the door open.
There was no one there. Outside could be heard a strange sniffling and whinnying. It was the grey stallion.
Gorromalt strode across the threshold. Scarcely had I time to prevent Aunt Elspeth from falling against the lintel in a corner, yet in a moment’s interval I saw that the stallion was riderless.
“Archibald!” wailed his wife faintly out of her weakness. “Archibald, come back! Come back!”
But there was no need to call. Archibald Campbell was not the man to fly in the face of God. He knew that no mortal rider rode that horse to its death that night. Even before he closed the door we heard the rapid, sliding, catching gallop. The horse had gone: rider or riderless I know not.
He was ashy-grey. Suddenly he had grown quite still. He lifted his wife, and helped her to her own big leathern arm-chair at the other side of the ingle.
“Light the lamp, lass,” he said to me, in a hushed strange voice. Then he stooped and threw some small pine-logs on the peats, and stirred the blaze till it caught the dry splintered edges.