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Cup Day is always a general holiday in the Daleland, and every soul crowds over to Silverdale. Shops were shut; special trains ran in to Grammoch-town; and the road from the little town was dazed with char-a-bancs, brakes, wagonettes, carriages, carts, foot-passengers, wending toward the Dalesman's Daughter.
And so on, the whole day through, week in, week out; till he sickened with weariness of it all. In his darkest hours David thought sometimes to run away. He was miserably alone on the cold bosom of the world. The very fact that he was the son of his father isolated him in the Daleland. Naturally of a reserved disposition, he had no single friend outside Kenmuir.
Owd Bob was not to run for the cup. And this self-denying ordinance speaks more for James Moore's love of his lost wife than many a lordly cenotaph. To the people of the Daleland, from the Black Water to the market-cross in Grammoch-town, the news came with the shock of a sudden blow. They had set their hearts on the Gray Dog's success; and had felt serenely confident of his victory.
"I wad not like to see ye pinched." "Thank ye kindly," the big man replied with some acerbity, and plunged out into the darkness and rain. Nor was that long-limbed drover-man ever again seen in the countryside. And the puppy's previous history whether he was honestly come by or no, whether he was, indeed, of the famous Red McCulloch* strain, ever remained a mystery in the Daleland.
Men told how the gray dog had outdone Gypsy Jack, the sheep-sneak; how he had cut out a Kenmuir shearling from the very centre of Londesley's pack; and a thousand like stories. The Gray Dogs of Kenmuir have always been equally heroes and favorites in the Daleland. And the confidence of the Dalesmen in Owd Bob was now invincible.
A coincidence it may have been, but, as a fact, for the fortnight succeeding Kirby's exploit there was a lull in the crimes. There followed, as though to make amends, the seven days still remembered in the Daleland as the Bloody Week. On the Sunday the Squire lost a Cheviot ewe, killed not a hundred yards from the Manor wall. On the Monday a farm on the Black Water was marked with the red cross.
"Small, yet big; light to get about on backs o' his sheep, yet not too light. Wi' a coat hard a-top to keep oot Daleland weather, soft as sealskin beneath. And wi' them sorrerful eyes on him as niver goes but wi' a good un. Amaist he minds me o' Rex son o' Rally." "Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" groaned Sam'l. But the old man heard him not.
And the talk of the men of the land is of wethers and gimmers, of tup-hoggs, ewe tegs in wool, and other things which are but fearsome names to you and me; and always of the doings or misdoings, the intelligence or stupidity, of their adjutants, the sheep-dogs. Of all the Daleland, the country from the Black Water to Grammoch Pike is the wildest.
In the Daleland that winter the endurance of many a shepherd and his dog was strained past breaking-point. From the frozen Black Water to the white-peaked Grammoch Pike two men only, each always with his shaggy adjutant, never owned defeat; never turned back; never failed in a thing attempted. In the following spring, Mr.
So the business of life began for that dog of whom the simple farmer-folk of the Daleland still love to talk, Bob, son of Battle, last of the Gray Dogs of Kenmuir. It is a lonely country, that about the Wastrel-dale. Parson Leggy Hornbut will tell you that his is the smallest church in the biggest parish north of the Derwent, and that his cure numbers more square miles than parishioners.
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