In the first moment of his loss he did not feel like retracing his steps. When he reached the main road he turned his face westward once more and set off walking as hard as the heat would allow him. He passed through a land of almost monotonous green, stopping once or twice to drink a pint of beer at a pub in one of the many half-timbered villages that straggled along the road. In the afternoon he reached a crest crowned with a plantation of smooth trunked beeches from which he could see the chimneys of an industrial town. This, he decided, must be Kidderminster, or, as the farmer’s man had called it, Kiddy. Once or twice in his life he had played football there for Mawne United, but in these excursions he had never noticed anything but the squalid streets between the station and the football ground. There was a workhouse in Kidderminster, as he had been told, but he was not yet in need of workhouses. The landlord of the last inn had found out that he was going into Wales, and had pointed out to him the rampart of the Malverns, dim-blue in the heat, as marking the course of his road. The idea of finding employment in the country now pleased him little. The sooner he reached the coal valleys, with the remains of his money, the better. From his new point of vantage the hills were still visible, floating like cragged islands in the haze. He left the smoke of Kidderminster on his right hand and forsook the road for a narrower lane that seemed to run in the direction that he wanted to follow. When evening came he was still walking south-west. Now the Malverns, whenever he saw them were etched black against a background of flame. The air was cool and sweeter. It was such an evening as Tiger would have loved, and his loneliness, which had been numbed by the heat, returned to him.

He must by this time have walked more than twenty miles since daybreak, and he was tired and hungry. Soon after sunset he turned in to an inviting public-house that stood alone on a straight length of road running between meagre oak-trees. The landlord was an aged man crippled with rheumatism who sat grasping two sticks in a chair beside the hearth of the taproom. He looked suspiciously at Abner and told his daughter, an angular woman of forty who did all the housework, to attend to him. This woman gave him clearly to understand that they didn’t like strangers and said that they could give him nothing to eat but bread and cheese. He accepted this gratefully and settled down to his supper under the grudging eyes of the old man.

The inn seemed a lonely and neglected place, for the road on which it was situate had fallen into disuse. Abner, however, was glad of a rest, and sat on smoking and drinking beer for the good of the house when he had finished his supper. The ale was good and put him in a happier frame of mind, so that he no longer found the silence of the old man uncomfortable. A little later a number of farm-labourers drifted in and ordered their quarts: a solemn and gloomy company who spoke little and in a language that Abner did not understand. He tried to put some life into them by standing treat, but even this order did not arouse the least enthusiasm in the landlord’s daughter, who might reasonably have felt that things were looking up, or in the company. These people were silent drinkers who sat in pairs, taking alternate swigs from the quart pot that stood between them. They looked upon Abner, this stranger from beyond the hills, as peaceful border farmers might have regarded a northern marauder. They drank his beer; but that was all that they could do for him. The light failed, but no lamp was lit in the taproom, and one by one the customers bade the landlord good-night and stole away like shadows. The woman put her head into the room from time to time as if she hoped to find that he was gone, and the old man sat by the fireplace saying nothing. Abner was sleepy and when she next appeared asked her if she could find him a bed. ‘Anything’ll do for me,’ he said. ‘I can shake down anywhere you like.’For the first time since Abner had seen her she was really positive. ‘We never do such a thing, do we, father?’ she cried. The old man did not appear to have heard her.

‘I bain’t one to make trouble,’ Abner said.

She wagged her head violently. ‘We never do such a thing,’ she repeated. She shook the old man’s shoulder. ‘Father, ’e says ’e wants to sleep ’ere!’

‘We don’t sleep no strangers,’ said he. ‘We don’t sleep no one. Not in a solitary place like this. You’d best be goin’, young man. Time to lock up . . . time to lock up.’

Abner asked him where he could go, but neither of them seemed inclined to help him. They knew of no house that would take strangers, and the nearest village, Harverton Priors, was more than three miles away. Even if he went there, they said, it was unlikely that he would be taken in. ‘We’m not accustomed to strangers, these parts,’ the woman kept on saying. She followed him like an anxious but impotent dog, edging him away from the counter as if she thought he had designs on the till. He bought an ounce of tobacco and departed. When she had got him out of the door he heard a key turn in the lock and this taciturn person beginning to talk fast in an excited whisper to the old man in the corner. Abner laughed. Thanks to the excellence of their beer he was at peace with the world.

By this time he was getting used to finding himself an object of suspicion. He determined to give Harverton Priors a miss, for at this time of night it was probable that the whole village would be asleep, and to turn in for the night in the first isolated barn that he found. Failing that there was no reason why he shouldn’t sleep in a dry ditch. His father had often done so unintentionally and so far seemed none the worse for it.

A mile or more from that inhospitable inn he saw the kind of building for which he was looking standing in a field on the left of the road. It was a red-brick barn, half-timbered like the houses of the neighbourhood. A group of cows lay ruminating in their sleep on the far side of it and Abner picked his way between their shadowy shapes to a doorway with an oak beam for lintel. A rough door closed the aperture. At first he thought that it was locked or bolted but it yielded to his pressure. He half expected to find some animal inside, for when he first came to the door he had heard a noise like a calf turning in straw. He struck a match carefully. The place was clean and dry, half filled with hay of the last season’s harvest that had evidently been placed there for winter fodder. He decided that the rustling that he had heard must have been made by rats. Well, rats wouldn’t worry him in his present degree of tiredness. He closed the door and sank down easily into a soft, sweet-smelling bed.

He lay still on his back with his eyes wide open staring into the darkness above him, thinking of the extraordinary variety of adventures that had filled the last twenty-four hours. This time last night, he reflected, he must have been dozing in the corner of the tram-car between Dulston and Mawne. Now he had nothing left to remind him of his old life except the clothes he was wearing . . . not even Tiger. He wondered what his father was feeling like now; wondered what had happened to Alice. He had never before thought so tenderly of her. She had shown what she was made of when she slipped the two sovereigns into his pocket. When he got work in Wales, he decided, he would send her money . . . not that she would really need it, for now sheer necessity would compel John Fellows to go back to the pit, unless indeed he had any of the money left that he had stolen from Abner. The thought of his savings suddenly reminded him what a fool he had been not to search his father’s pockets before he left the house. On the whole he wasn’t sorry that he had left him undisturbed. He didn’t feel unkindly toward him, for he recognised that no man is responsible for what he says or does when he is drunk. In the black-country people who know the rougher side of life are always ready to condone crimes of passion or liquor. ‘The old chap’s welcome to the money,’ Abner thought, ‘leastwise if any of it comes our Alice’s way.’His mind was still too crowded for sleep. He thought he would have a smoke and began to fill his pipe with the tobacco he had bought earlier in the evening. Again he heard a rustling noise in the hay. When he lit his pipe he would try to see what caused it. He waited, listening, and when next he heard it struck a match and peered in the direction from which it came.

‘Douse that light, mate,’ said a voice, almost at his elbow, ‘and take your bloody feet off my chest. You’ll be afther settin’ the place alight and sending the both of us to hell before our time!’

Abner dropped his match with astonishment. The other, suddenly materialising, put his foot on the glowing fragment.

‘I reckon you give me a bit of a start,’ said Abner, laughing.

‘Start, is it? It’s finished we’ll be if you go throwing match-sticks that way into a heap of tinder.’ The turn of speech amused Abner.

‘It’s easy to see that you don’t know the way to travel, or you wouldn’t be doing the like of that,’ said his unseen companion. ‘I may well be stranded to the world, but it’s not burning I want this night of our lord, I’m tellin’ you.’

He settled down into the hay again, this time at some distance from Abner. Abner had never yet caught a glimpse of him. He could not tell whether he was old or young, pleasant-looking or villainous, but he knew that the stranger was the first person who had accepted him without question since his wanderings began. He no longer felt sleepy and was indeed glad of a chance to talk with another human being. In this at any rate his shadowy companion was ready to oblige him, taking the conversation into his own hands without the least hesitation. He asked Abner where he had come from and how long he had been on the road.

‘God help me!’ he said, ‘you’re not born yet!’ Then he asked Abner if he could spare him a gorm. Abner had not the least idea what a gorm was, but the voice explained that it meant a little weeny dooney bit of tobacco—‘for to chew,’ he explained, ‘we don’t want anny more fireworks. “Anny more for Annimore,” as the guard says.’

Abner gave him his gorm, deciding that the owner of the voice, whatever he looked like, was a cough-drop. They drifted into a discussion of Abner’s adventures during the day.

The owner of the voice, who in the course of conversation proclaimed himself to be a certain Mick Connor, usually known as Kerry Mick, had apparently followed much the same track as Abner. He had been refused refreshment at the Barley Mow and taken a dismal pint from the hands of the landlord’s daughter at the second inn, whose nose, he said, would poke a ragman over a double ditch. He listened more seriously to Abner’s account of Tiger’s death. ‘You’re after losin’ a good friend,’ he said, and after a moment of silence in which his jaws could be heard masticating his gorm, embarked on a long story of his own youth. ‘I’ll tell you something quare,’ he said.

It had happened more than twenty years ago in the county of Kerry—Abner was none the wiser—in the very first situation that Mick Connor had ever taken. ‘There was money in Ireland them days,’ he said. ‘The country’s gone to the dogs ever sence the Boer War.’ He was engaged as pantry-boy, at six pounds a year and a suit of clothes, and he earned it by cleaning thirty lamps and a dozen pair of shoes every morning before breakfast and waiting at meal-times in the servants’ hall. The rest of the day he spent in dodging the butler, an ould devil with a lip would trip a duck, who liked his pint more than most and used to threaten to take the skin off of him with a twig whenever he saw him.

The story seemed to lead nowhere, but Mick Connor’s voice was low and persuasive and he evidently liked talking. Abner lay and listened.

Even in those early days Mick Connor had been used to the open air. He hated house-work, he said, and would often go off and hide himself under the dining-room table, a place of concealment which the butler at last discovered, to cry. He would stand at the pantry windows looking out over the fields to the river where the third footman was already enjoying himself catching eels and perch in the holes. The house was a prison to him. The only friend that ever came to him from outside it was a wolfhound who slept in the stables, but with whom he had made great friends ever since he had been in the house by feeding it with scraps from the pantry. The butler hated dogs, and this dog above all others because it had once stolen a ham. Mick loved it and fed it regularly. It used to jump up to the pantry window and lick his face through the bars.

When he had been in this place for a year or more the family moved for the summer to another house on the coast some thirty miles away. For Mick it was a happy change. He and his friend the third footman were chosen to go there and the savage butler was left behind. There were no railways in that part of Ireland, and so they went to Coulagh by road. The children were to follow with their nurse the next day, so the footman and the cook preceded them in a wagonette loaded with luggage. They went slowly, and behind them walked Mick, leading two pannier asses named Haidee and Mokie, on which the children would go for rides by the shore. They started late and the last part of their journey was made in the dark. The cook, who had a drop taken, was telling ghost stories fitting to that wild hour and place. There was one tale in particular of how she had met the devil in the flesh sitting by a milestone near Coulagh three years before that made Mick afraid to look on either side of him. He walked with Haidee on his right and Mokie on his left and the tail of the wagonette in front of him, and even then he didn’t feel safe.

When they came to Coulagh in the darkness they had a grand supper, but even in the cheerful firelight Mick couldn’t forget the details of the cook’s encounter with the devil. The house was small, and it had been settled that he, as the least important member of the party, should sleep in a little room above the stable in which the asses were housed. He was thankful that the animals were there, for otherwise he would have gone mad with the loneliness. When he reached the stable he went into the stall and talked to them and got on the two of their backs, sitting first on one and then on the other the way they wouldn’t be jealous. Then he patted their necks, rubbed their noses, and went up the wooden stairs to bed. He undressed, got into bed and put out his candle. But he couldn’t sleep, partly because the room was so strange after the cook’s stories and partly because a wind was blowing fit to bring the house down. All of a sudden the wind fell, and in the quiet he could hear another sound like a door banging and the rattle of chains. He supposed he had not fastened the stable latch, but even if the asses got their ends of cold, he didn’t dare to put his nose out of bed. But the noise of bumping and chains continued. Even when he put his head under the clothes he could still hear it. ‘I can hear it the way I am now,’ he told Abner, ‘a great, rattlin’, t’udding noise. I commenced to get terrible afraid. “Something’s surely coming now,” I thought. “God help me!” And it came on bumping and rattling up the stairs. “This is the devil,” says I, “let loose on me!” an’ when I put my head under the clothes what should I see but all the things I’d ever done in this life; all the birds I’d took the heads of off with a catapult, flittin’ about with no heads and the wings broke on them, and all the bottles of whisky I’d ever stolen on the butler. An’ the noise come bumping upstairs. “God, I’m gone!” I says, getting down middleways in the bed, and with the same there was a great t’ud and the door flew open on me and it come into the room. Bump, bump, bump it went, an’ the chairs went over and the basin of water I’d never washed in come down with a crash—and I lying there with the pespiration running down me on to the sheets like a spout. “God, I’m gone!” I says again, and that was the last word I spoke that night, for the sheets was stuck to me back. Then it comes over to the bed, and I tries to get under the mattress, but before I knew where I was I felt two great hands on the both of my thighs. “Now I’m destroyed altogether,” says I, but before I’d finished thinking it come on the top of me in a lump with the chain draggin’ along the floor, and me lyin’ there not as thick as a match. Then I commenced to feel the sheet being drew down over my face and two hairy arms round my neck, and with that a great, big, hot tongue licking me. “Ah, my beautiful,” says I, “I have you at last.” That dog was so fond on me he’d smelt me out over thirty miles and pulled the log he was tied to in the stable after him and broke down the door and come upstairs into bed with me. I loved that dog. And that’s why I say you’re after losin’ a good friend in yours. Give me the lend of another gorm to go to sleep on.’

Abner gave him the tobacco, and after that the story-teller was silent. Falling asleep, Abner heard only the regular noise of his companion’s jaws as they chewed. In half an hour they were both asleep.

Early next morning Mick Connor woke him, telling him that unless they cleared out the farmer’s men would find them. Abner was far too comfortable for the moment to want to move, but as soon as he regained full consciousness he realised that his skin was itching all over.

‘This place is alive with fleas,’ he said.

His companion only laughed. ‘That’s all you know about it,’ he said, ‘and the both of us eat with hayseeds. I’m after telling you somethin’. Never choose hay to sleep in if you can fin’ straw. It’s worse than a houseful of bugs.’

Abner was curious to see the owner of last night’s voice and the teller of stories. He found it difficult to fit in the man with his narration. It was impossible to guess his age, but his hair was slightly touched with gray and stood up in a frizzy mass that made him look wilder than he was. He was of middle height, thin and very wiry, with a small head, bright eyes like a bird and a bony face in which the skin over the cheekbones was netted with red veins. His eyes were blue, and humorous or savage as the occasion took him. At this hour of the morning he did not appear anxious to talk and his voice that had been soft and persuasive in the darkness, was rough and short. They left the barn together. The cows were still sleeping outside and a dew was on the grass, but the moisture had not fallen on the road, which seemed as baked and dusty as ever.‘Which ways are you going?’ the Irishman asked.

‘Going to Wales,’ said Abner.

‘Then the two of us had better travel together,’ he said, and Abner consented.

They walked for some miles in silence. Mick, at this hour of the morning was not disposed to talk. He went on ahead with a long, loping gait, very different from the tramp’s habitual shuffle. They came to a brick bridge that proclaimed itself unsuitable for traction engines, and here he suddenly climbed the hedge and started to wash himself in a bed of cresses. He took out the broken end of a comb and smoothed his wet hair close to his head like a picture of the Madonna. The water took the gray out of it so that he looked almost young. Abner also washed, and when he had picked the irritating hayseeds out of his shirt, he offered his companion half of a piece of bread that remained in his pocket. Mick took it without a word and dipped it in the water. Without this soaking he could not have tackled it, for though his bristling moustache concealed the fact, he had scarcely any teeth.

Eating this breakfast together they sprawled on the bank of the stream among rushes, with which Abner amused himself by stripping the pith with his nails. His silent and melancholy companion broke the silence by asking him if he had any money. Immediately Abner was suspicious. His second sovereign and all his silver were secreted in his waistcoat pocket. He had placed them there in the night as soon as he realised that he was not sleeping alone. In answer to his friend’s question he produced a handful of coppers. ‘Tenpence ha’penny,’ he said. ‘That won’t go far.’

‘Houly sufferings!’ said the other, ‘is it carry ten-pence halfpenny three miles?’

He spoke no more, and they set off again. During the rest of the day Mick Connor maintained his attitude of detachment, striding on ahead of Abner as though he had nothing to do with him. They bought a stale loaf in a small market town and the Irishman produced from the treacle tin that he carried three eggs and some rashers of bacon. They lit a fire on the edge of a wood and made a good meal. Toward evening they crossed a wide river flowing silently between high banks. Mick, who appeared to know the country, told Abner that this was the last bridge for twenty miles. Beyond the stream a little town lay smoking under the hill-side. They drank a pint of beer together and pushed on. The evening light seemed to awaken Mick. He became talkative and profane at once, disclosing to Abner the fact that he knew where good work was to be had. He scoffed at the idea of Abner’s working underground while there was a chance of earning his living in the open air. ‘I can put you in the way of a job will make your teeth water,’ he said. At first he kept up an atmosphere of mystery of the kind that particularly pleased him, but when Abner pressed him he disclosed the fact that he had learned from a tramp near Bromsgrove how the corporation of North Bromwich were engaged in relaying a defective piece of piping ten miles long in their Welsh water scheme, and that casual labour was hard to get in those parts. With the combination of his own wit and Abner’s strength they should find a comfortable job to last them for six months. He reckoned that three days’ walking would bring them easily to the site of the work, and gave Abner to understand that he was lucky to have met him. Abner was ready to acknowledge this. ‘That’s all right then,’ said Mick, ‘and now about that tenpence halfpenny. Do you think I’d be after sleeping wud you and not know of the gold sovereign that’s in your waistcoat pocket this moment? It’s on the table the cards should be if we’re travelling together.’

At this Abner was really angry. He didn’t like the idea of any one, friend or no, rummaging in his pockets at night. They stopped in the road quarrelling, and Abner took off his coat, preparing to settle the matter with blows before parting company. The Irishman seemed surprised that he took it so roughly; pointed out that when he had the chance of stealing Abner’s money he hadn’t taken it, said that he didn’t want a penny of it. Little by little, with soft and humorous words he cooled Abner’s anger. At the next inn they split the sovereign over two quarts of beer, and by the time he had finished drinking Abner was ready to go shares with the change, an offer that Mick was too generous to accept. ‘What for would I want money?’ he said, ‘as long as I’d have the price of a naggin in my pockut?’ A man must be a fool, he added, if he couldn’t travel in a fat country the likes of England without money. In Ireland, it was true, one had to use one’s wits, for every one else was doing the same thing. He searched in his pockets and laid out a yellow piece of paper among the beer-spills on the inn table. An Irishman’s passport, he called it. Actually it was an eviction order, which seemed to Abner an unusual type of letter of credit. Not a bit of it, said Mick. In Ireland all you had to do was to carry this along with you and tell a tale about the little children was starving on you, and you could kick a shillun out of every priest you come across. In the old days there was many a toff that’d give you half a crown to be rid of you. They had another drink, and Mick became rhapsodical on the subject of money. What good had money ever done him? Money . . . in his day he’d had the money would buy the two sides of Grafton Street. He recalled his great double on Winkfield’s Pride and Manifesto for the Lincoln and National. Three hundred pounds in his pocket . . . but it went away like wather. Porther would have supplied a better simile. When once he began to talk about horses there was no stopping him. The lust of the born gambler shone in his small blue eyes. ‘Take away racing and I’m gone,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing that keeps the life in me!’ He went on talking until he saw that Abner was nearly asleep over the table, then he plucked at his arm. ‘Come along,’ he said, ‘let’s be getting a move on before we’re threw out.’

That night, in a condition of sublime charity toward the world and each other, they could find no barn to sleep in and rolled themselves up on a bank of dry bracken under the misty moon. Counting his money next morning Abner found that most of it had gone. He knew better than to grumble about it, but suggested to Mick that they had better go easy.‘Go aisy, is it? Not at all!’ said the Irishman.

At midday, leaving Abner in a small spinney of firs, he went off to the nearest village with the price of a quart, and returned a couple of hours later laden not only with the beer but with a good-sized fowl and pockets full of potatoes. Displaying these spoils he winked, and Abner asked no questions. They boiled water in Mick’s treacle tin, and having poured this over the bird to make the plucking easy, roasted it with the potatoes in the embers of their fire. It was a splendid meal. Beneath its charred covering the flesh was sweet and juicy. Abner had never felt fitter in his life or freer from every vestige of care. When the meal was over Mick slept like a gorged boa-constrictor and woke in an ill-temper, but by this time Abner was getting used to his alternations of enthusiasm and melancholy and left him alone. It was a good life: there was no denying that, and in another day or so they would arrive at the scene of their new work.

That misty moon was no negligible portent, for at sunset great clouds began to gather from the south, and, before night, fell a thunder shower that drenched them. The dusty road drank up the rain and all the earth smelt sweet, but the August weather had broken and the country of wooded hills into which they had now come seemed to breed rain. They decided that it would be impossible to dry their clothes, and pushed on through the night, Mick loping ahead like some drowned bird and Abner stolidly following. They passed through the wet streets of a country town at midnight. Not a light could be seen in the solemn Georgian houses, but from a belfry, almost lost in cloud, the sound of a plaintive carillon floated down.

‘Ludlow,’ said Mick. ‘There do be races here.’

They crossed another noisy river. The road climbed endlessly, winding over a steep hill-side. They entered a forest where the rain troubled them no more, so tired that they decided to rest for a while. Here they had the luck to find a hut thatched with heather that had been used by woodcutters. At the risk of burning it over their heads they lit a fire with some dry branches that they found inside it. Here they lay half-blinded with wood-smoke stolidly chewing tobacco, for Abner, unused to the road, had allowed his store to become soaked. Mick soon fell asleep, but Abner could not do so. He lay there till dawn in his steaming clothes, listening to the incessant dripping of the rain from millions of leaves, a sound that was soothing in spite of its desolation. Sometimes a wind that could not be felt would stir the tops of the trees to a commotion and then the drops would fall like hail on the soaked leaves of the forest. The fire died down; there was no more wood in the hut, and drops of water began to fall from the roof into the hissing embers. It was hellishly cold, but Mick still slept like a dog, though his left leg twitched in his sleep. At dawn Abner woke him. He grumbled because Abner in his vigil had finished the tobacco. It looked once more as if they were going to fall out, but the sense of common misery was too great to allow them to do so.

They tramped on through the woods in the rain. They could see nothing ahead of them but misty trees and no sound came to them but that of dripping moisture and sometimes the harsh call of a jay. The sun was so completely veiled that dawn passed into day almost without their knowing it. Only a whiter, colder light gleamed from the wet leaves. ‘We’ll never get shut on these bleedin’ trees,’ said Abner; but his companion did not answer. Suddenly Mick began to sing in a hoarse, unnatural voice:—

Macarthy took the floor in Enniscorthy;
Macarthy took the floor in Enniscorthy;
For his eyes and ears and nose
Were like marbles on the floor
Of the fragments of the man they called Macarthy.

He sang the same verse over and over again, and at the end of the third repetition, he stood stock still, for they had come to the edge of the wood. ‘By the houly, we’re through wud it!’ he said.

The huge confusion of the Radnor march lay before them, vast and sombre and wild with cloud. To north and south of the spot where they were standing the woods rolled backward into England, upward to the sky. It was difficult to believe that they had emerged a little below the crest of the hills, for the precipitous wall behind them rose magnificently black into the mist with fleeces of cloud entangled in its surface like wisps of wool in a winter hedge. Beneath their feet a lake of white vapour hid the trough of the Teme valley lapping the bases of other wooded hills. Nothing could they see but dark masses of trees thrown into fantastic folds and pinnacles by the shapes of the hills that carried them: an amphitheatre of savage stone fleeced with unending woods. ‘That’s Wales,’ said Mick. ‘God! I could do with a drop!’

In spite of the melancholy grandeur of the scene Abner felt that an end was in sight. They scrambled down a steep bank, and Mick, still singing, stampeded a flock of horned black-faced sheep that crowded with glistening wool under the lee of a hedge. They crossed a zone of huge, wind-writhen hawthorns and came to a road, or rather a rutted track of wheels that cut the hill-side diagonally. In the middle of this track stood a wooden sled with iron chains for carting timber and a pile of tree-trunks that had been dumped at this stage of their descent from the woods.

‘Plenty of work here,’ said Mick, ‘time they’ve finished clearing these.’

They followed the track to a gate that gave on to a metalled road. Even this was heavily scarred with the cartage of timber. On every side the vast debris of forestry was seen. Birds began to sing in the wet hedgerows. The road was alive with yellow-hammers and linnets. The rain ceased.

The scramble down the hill-side had warmed them and they now walked at a good pace. Villages were few, the greatest of them no more than hamlets clustered about red-brick farms, and as yet no labourers were seen in the fields. For miles and miles they passed no public-house.

‘Ne’er a drop stirrin’,’ said Mick. ‘This is a grand country, right enough!’

By eight o’clock the sun was through and the folding mist, sucked upwards, revealed great stretches of arable land that would have been melancholy in dull weather but now began to gleam in patches of warm colour. Moisture clarified all the air; oat-fields ripening for harvest were full of tawny lights, and the breasts of the linnets rosy. A signpost told them that they were less than a mile from Aston by Lesswardine, and in a few moments they saw a little church hedged in with pagan yews and a dilapidated parsonage still dead asleep. Mick thanked God for the sight of an inn, even though it were closed. A swinging sign with a heraldic device battered by long conflict with rain and wind proclaimed it the Delahay Arms. Tall hollyhocks stood sentinel on either side of the door.

At the end of the village they took a cross-road to Lesswardine, moving through water-meadows of brilliant emerald with placid dykes on either side. Somewhere near them ran a river, its course marked by a black line of brushwood. Sunlight becoming more generous warmed them through and through. The road drew near to the river and to a spur of hills nursing the valley of a tributary. In a sheltered coomb they saw an encampment of white tents bleaching in the sun. A wood fire was lighted among them. The smoke went straight upward. Round the fire they saw men lounging in their shirt-sleeves among great stacks of alder-wood. There was a tempting smell of bacon in the air which made their mouths water.

‘What are these chaps about, Mick?’ Abner asked.

‘Cloggers,’ Mick shouted back to him.