Free No Way Of Telling by Emma Smith Page B

length of it. The sheep shifted uneasily. Again, climbing the slope, he reached for Amy’s hand. He had brought a ski-stick with him and went so fast she was glad enough to let herself be towed behind, though whether he did it playfully, or really so as to help her, or even because he thought she might otherwise change her mind, Amy was not sure. Half-way up he stopped. The man in the knitted cap who had been following, stopped as well.
    Her companion leant on his stick.
    “I’m afraid your old grandmother isn’t very fond of strangers,” he said.
    “There’s not many come this way,” she replied, meaning it as an apology, and added shyly: “I waved to you this afternoon.” At once she regretted her words: they seemed to reproach him.
    “Yes, I saw you. It was most kind of you. Thank you for waving.”
    He was not annoyed with her; he was smiling. She caught a gleam of his teeth in the dusk and felt relieved. He was very good-natured.
    “Has there been anyone else to wave to today?” he asked.
    “Oh, no!” she said, thankful the question was easy to answer truthfully.
    For Amy’s conscience perplexed her. She longed to pour out to him the whole story of what had happened last night, but because her grandmother had kept silent about it she felt under an obligation to keep silent too. It distressed her to do so. She knew they ought to tell him; it was wrong not to tell him. Why should they show mercy to someone who had behaved like an enemy, breaking into their home, terrifying them, stealing things?
    And yet when, in her mind, she called their intruder an enemy she seemed to hear her grandmother’s voice: “He never harmed us, Amy.” And when she tried to conjure up his dreadful face all she could see was that arm slung, wounded, across his chest. “He acted like he was in a daze... he didn’t know what he was doing.” A confusion of echoes and pictures filled her head on the snowy darkening hillside.
    “Amy!” She was recalled by an actual voice, a soft, slow, insistent voice. “I want you to tell me if you’ve seen anyone about—anyone at all—since it started to snow?”
    Suddenly she knew, forlornly, that he had brought her out here alone, had taken her hand and called her Amy, simply so as to ask her this question and be answered without interference. It had meant no more than that. Well, she could astonish him with her answer if she wanted to! She did want to, and yet she heard herself saying, evasively:
    “There was Mr Protheroe—that was yesterday, though, just after I got back from school. We got sent home early. He was fetching his sheep down. It was coming on hard then, a real blizzard. He missed to get five of them—there’s one out somewhere now.”
    The remembrance of the lost ewe pained her as sharply as a forgotten thorn in the finger.
    “And you’ve seen no sign of anyone else?”
    “What sort of a sign?” she asked him, stupidly.
    “I mean, have you noticed anything unusual? Anything to make you think there might have been someone about—during the night, for instance?”
    “No!” said Amy quickly, loudly, and her heart sank like a piece of lead for she had committed herself to a lie and now he could never be her friend. Never! She had deceived him without even knowing why she had done it. They went on up the hill again in single file.
    At the top the two men halted and stared in all directions.
    “The haystack’s on a bit, down there,” said Amy, timidly.
    They looked briefly where she pointed and then resumed their intent scrutiny. It was dark now, and yet because of the snow not very dark. Mysteriously pale, the land stretched away. The sky was starry. And still there was no wind, no sound, no movement, not even a sense of time passing, only a sense of waiting and of a curious empty vastness.
    “Nothing!” said the man in the knitted cap at last, uttering what was the first clear word Amy had heard from him.
    “You’d better run along home,” the other one