“Peace,” said one of the sleepers, raising himself half-way,—­“I think we be like to bide here till our bones rot.  There’s nought but the same dun sky,—­black, black, and unchanging.  I should like to see a stiff blaze from some quarter.  Our bundle, here, would soon be in a low.”

“Hark!” said the other, “’tis something creaking amongst the faggots.”

The sentinel rushed out, but the beacon was undisturbed.

“St Mary protect us!—­’Tis the same noise I heard last night, and about the same hour.”

The stranger here entered the hut.  Enveloped in a huge cloak, he sate silent, and apparently inattentive; but the conversation was now abrupt, and broken down into short and interrupted whispers.

“I wish old Hal and his wives were here, with all my heart,” said one:  “we’d have a rare bonfire.  How his fat paunch would swell!  But for him and his unlucky women, we had been snug in the chimney-corner, snoring out psalmody, or helping old Barn’by off with the tit-bits in the kitchen.”

“Hush!” said his neighbour:  “there be the faggots talking again.  I think they are bewitched.—­Dan, look to them.”

“Nay,” said Dan, “they may bide awhile for me.”

The words were scarcely uttered when the building seemed in a blaze.  Crash upon crash followed.  The inmates, stupified with terror, were well nigh suffocated ere their astonishment left them the power to escape.  In the full conviction that the foul fiend had taken him at his word, Dan was dragged from the hut, wan, speechless, and gasping with affright.  Nothing less, too, than a visit from his Satanic majesty in person was expected by the terrified rustics.

On gaining the outside, the whole burning mass was before them, one vast pyramid of flame.  Flakes of blazing matter were hurled into the sky, with short and rapid explosions.  The roar of the wind through the glowing furnace was awful and appalling.  Huge and ignited fragments were borne away with frightful rapidity.  They rode on the rolling volumes of smoke like fire-fiends armed with destruction; but the vast reservoir of flame still glowed on, apparently undiminished.  The curtain of night seemed to be suddenly undrawn.  Objects the most minute were visible as in the broad view of day.  The brown heath, the grey and the mossy stone, were each distinguishable, but clad alike in one bright and unvarying colour, red as the roaring furnace.  Soon the great magazine of inflammable matter in the interior caught fire, and rolled out in a wide mass of light, like the first burst of a volcano.

The stranger stood with apparent unconcern, his back to the flames, looking from the brink of the mountain northward, as if on the watch for corresponding signals.  Soon a bright star hung on the heights above Sawley.  Increasing in splendour, another broke out on the verge of the horizon, marking the site of the camp near Romald’s Moor.

Turning towards the south-west, and looking to the right, beyond the chain of successive heights that form the vale of Todmorden, he beheld a dim spark in the distance, from the summit of Hades Hill, scarcely penetrating the mist which hung like a dense cloud in that direction; this place and Thieveley Pike forming the connecting-links between Pendle Hill and Buckton Castle.