The passengers buttoned their coats tightly as they went forward, for the weather was growing worse and the wind came tearing in their faces. Before darkness fell, fringes of rain-cloud, which had hung all day over the Grampians, began to sweep over them. The horses laid back their ears as heavy drops, mixed with hail, struck them in sensitive places and the coachman’s hands were stiff on the reins from the chill water running off his gloves. Now and again the gale raised its voice like an angry woman, and the road reflected the lamps as though it had been a pond. They had left Forfar some time when the coachman, in the darkness, turned a hard, dripping face to Gilbert, who was on the box-seat. ‘D’ye hear yon?’ he said, lifting his whip. Speid leaned his head sideways and was conscious of a roar above the voice of the blast; a tossing and rolling sea of noise in the air which he thought must be like the sound of waves closing above the head of a drowning man. It was the roar of the trees in Monrummon. As the coach plunged in, the dark ocean of wood swallowed it up, and it began to rock and sway on one of the bad roads intersecting the moor. The smell of raw earth and wet heather was mixed with the strong scent of the firs that laboured, surged, buffeted overhead in the frenzy of the wind. The burns that, in places, crossed their road had now become turgid torrents, dragging away soil and stones in their rush. ‘It’ll na’ do to loss oursel’s here,’ observed the coachman. ‘Haud up, man!’ The last exclamation was addressed to the off wheeler, who had almost slipped on a round stone laid bare by the water flaying the track. The only inside passenger, a West-country merchant on his way north, let down the window and put out his head, to draw it in promptly, outraged by finding himself in such surroundings and by the behaviour of the elements outside. Such things did not happen in Glasgow. It was when they were on the middle of the moor that the bed of a burn, steeper than any they had yet encountered, crossed their way. It was not much wider than an ordinary ditch, but the force of the water driven through it had scored the bottom deep, for the soil was soft in its course. The coachman had his team well together as they went down the slope to it, and Gilbert watched him, roused from his abstraction by the fascinating knowledge that a man of parts was handling the reins. The feet of the leaders were clear of the water and those of the wheelers washed by the red swirl in the burn’s bed, when the air seemed to rush more quickly a few yards to their left, and, with a crack like that of the sky splitting, the heavy head of a fir-tree came tearing downwards through its fellows. The terrified horses sprang forward up the steep ground; the coach staggered like a drunkard; the pole dipped, rocking upwards, and the pole-chains flashed in the light of the swinging lamps as it snapped in two.