第47章 A MAD DOG(1)

DAVID and Maggie, meanwhile, were drifting further and further apart. He now thought the girl took too much upon herself; that this assumption of the woman and the mother was overdone. Once, on a Sunday, he caught her hearing Andrew his catechism. He watched the performance through a crack in the door, and listened, giggling, to her simple teaching. At length his merriment grew so boisterous that she looked up, saw him, and, straightway rising to her feet, crossed the room and shut the door; tendering her unspoken rebuke with such a sweet dignity that he slunk away for once decently ashamed. And the incident served to add point to his hostility.

Consequently he was seldom at Kenmuir, and more often at home, quarrelling with his father.

Since that day, two years before, when the boy had been an instrument in the taking of the Cup from him, father and son had been like two vessels charged with electricity, contact between which might result at any moment in a shock and a flash. This was the outcome not of a moment, but of years.

Of late the contest had raged markedly fierce; for M Adam noticed his son's more frequent presence at home, and commented on the fact in his usual spirit of playful raillery.

"What's come to ye, David?" he asked one day. "Yer auld dad's head is nigh turned wi' yer condescension. Is James Moore feared ye'll steal the Cup fra him, as ye stole it from me, that he'll not ha'

ye at Kenmuir? or what is it?"

"I thought I could maybe keep an eye on the Killer gin I stayed here," David answered, leering at Red Wull.

"Ye'd do better at Kenmuir--eh, Wuflie!" the little man replied.

"Nay," the other answered, "he'll not go to Kenmuir. There's Th'

Owd TJn to see to hini there o' nights."

The little man whipped round.

"Are ye so sure he is there o' nights, ma lad?" he asked with slow significance.

"He was there when some one--I dinna say who, though I have ma thoughts--tried to poison him," sneered the boy, mimicking his father's manner.

M'Adam shook his head.

"II he was poisoned, and noo I think aiblins he was, he didna pick it up at Kenmuir, I tell ye that," he said, and marched out of the room.

In the mean time the Black Killer pursued his bloody trade unchecked. The public, always greedy of a new sensation, took up the matter. In several of the great dailies, articles on the "Agrarian Outrages" appeared, followed by lengthy correspondence.

Controversy raged high; each correspondent had his own theory and his own solution of the prob1cm; and each waxed indignant as his were discarded for another's.

The Terror had reigned already two months when, with the advent of the lambing-time, matters took a yet more serious aspect.

It was bad enough to lose one sheep, often the finest in the pack;but the hunting of a flock at a critical moment, which was incidental to the slaughter of the one, the scaring of these woolly mothers-about-to-be almost out of their fleeces, spelt for the small farmers something akin to ruin, for the bigger ones a loss hardly bearable.

Such a woful season had never been known; loud were the curses, deep the vows of revenge. Many a shepherd at that time patrolled all night through with his dogs, only to find in the morning that the Killer had slipped him and havocked in some secluded portion of his beat.

It was heartrending work; and all the more so in that, though his incrimination seemed as far off as ever, there was still the same positiveness as to the culprit's identity.

Long Kirby, indeed, greatly daring, went so far on one occasion as to say to the little man: "And d'yo' reck'n the Killer is a sheepdog, M'Adam?""I do," the little man replied with conviction.

"And that he'll spare his own sheep?"

"Niver a doubt of it."

"Then," said the smith with a nervous cackle, "it must lie between you and Tupper and Saunderson."The little man leant forward and tapped the other on the arm.

"Or Kenmuir, ma friend," he said. "Ye've forgot Kenmuir.""So I have," laughed the smith, "so I have."

"Then I'd not anither time," the other continued, still tapping. "I'd mind Kenmuir, d'ye see, Kirby?"It was about the middle of the lambingtime, when the Killer was working his worst, that the Dalesmen had a lurid glimpse of Adam M'Adam as he might be were he wounded through his Wullie.

Thus it came about: It was market-day in Grammoch-town, and in the Border Ram old Rob Saunderson was the centre of interest. For on the previous night Rob, who till then had escaped unscathed, had lost a sheep to the Killer: and--far worse--his flock of Herdwicks, heavy in lamb, had been galloped with disastrous consequences.