Next morning when Abner came downstairs in the dark he found George making himself a cup of tea in the kitchen.

‘That you, Abner?’ he said, turning his neck gingerly as though it hurt his head to speak. ‘God! It’s lifting the top of my skull off! This dose’ll last me for a bit. Mind you, I wasn’t so boozed I can’t remember what happened. I should have slept up against that old wall if you hadn’t come along. You’m a good pal, Abner.’ At this point his voice gave out. ‘Have a spot of tea?’ he said in a hoarse whisper.

As usual they walked down the valley together at dawn. The fields lay hoary with rime, so that the light of dawn was like cloudy moonlight. Their heels crunched into the brittle ice of the wheel-ruts. Before them, on the white road, ran the wayward pattern of Spider’s dancing feet. Not a bird sang. The cold air gripped their temples. It was as though winter were closing on the world and those who dwelt in it like an iron vice. Dawn whitened beyond Castel Ditches: light without heat—light reflected from ice. But the steady walking thawed their limbs and George was soon asking in a husky voice for details of what had happened the night before. Something in Mary’s attitude when they woke that morning had struck him as unusual. He guessed that she had found a new grievance, and was anxious to know what she had said. He laughed when Abner told him that she had questioned him on the subject of Susie: laughed till the cold air choked him.

‘They’m all the same, the women,’ he said. ‘Jealous . . . that’s the top and bottom of them. What did you tell her?’

‘Said I hadn’t seen you at the Pound House.’

‘God! You didn’t say I’d been to Lesswardine?’

‘I dain’t know naught about it.’

‘And the less you know the better, or you’ll be having these women buzz round you like flies. You can tell our Mary what you like, but you’ll need to keep your eyes skinned with mother. I’ve got to bide on the right side of the old woman or it’s all up. She’ll have it out of you before you know you’re there.’

By this time they had reached the lower end of the valley to which the cloggers had lately transferred their work. The whole gang were now housed in the Buffalo and the other scattered cottages of Chapel Green, but a couple of tents were left standing on the banks of the Folly Brook and the smoke of a wood-fire went up blue into the air.

‘I can’t make mother out,’ George grumbled. ‘Here she is with Wigan Joe and the rest of them in the house: a mint of money for the asking, and she goes scaring them over to Mainstone with her long face. If I had the Buffalo I’d soon see they spent their money in the house. It’s as good as robbing me the way she sends them away. She don’t want the money, but I want it bad enough, God knows!’

They parted when they reached the workings. George whistled to Spider, but the dog only wagged her tail and then dived into a trench, preferring to stay with Abner. Munn appeared, rubbing his hands with cold. Abner laughed at him.

‘Put your back into it, Joe, and you’ll soon feel right,’ he said.

The day’s work began. A red sun rose sluggishly, half frozen. The light glinted on the long line of swinging picks and the sounds of the work rose cheerily in the thin air. Very different was this from the subdued activity of summer. The labourers did not work only for money but because the exertion sent the blood tingling warm into their hands and feet. Work was an ecstasy and to Abner a greater ecstasy than to the rest of them. He thought of Susie and of the night before. He whistled as he worked for sheer physical joy, rejoicing in his strength, for now once more, after months of soft disuse, his body was finding its right expression and coming splendidly to its own. He stretched his limbs in the sunlight, recapturing the moments of physical exaltation that used to come to him when the Mawne United team stepped out on to the smooth turf of the Albion ground, a company of clean and splendid athletes. And all the time, beneath the pleasant anodyne of work, his body glowed with a rich contentment, knowing that in a few hours night would come and Susie be clinging in his arms again.

He had no fear that she would forsake him. He felt, in every fibre of his body that he was a match, and more than a match for Badger. Having once attained her he knew that he could keep her; and in this he was not deceived, for Susie, having looked on him and found that he was good, had taken a fancy to him and now kept pace with his passion, asking as much as he could give. Every evening, as was already his custom, he would go to the Pound House and take his seat beside Gunner Eve; but now he no longer needed to follow Susie with his eyes, was no longer tortured with vague jealousies, for when she passed him he could feel her soften and respond to his presence. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she would turn her head in his direction and for a moment their eyes would meet. He did not care when men spoke to her lightly or placed their hands upon her arm, for now he knew that she belonged to him and could be his for the asking. The events of the first night were repeated many times. Now a single whisper was enough to ensure that when the alehouse was empty and Mr Hind safely in bed, the kitchen door would be opened softly and Susie waiting for him in the warm darkness. It amused Abner to see the coldness that she now showed toward Badger. The keeper was puzzled, for all their love-making was secret and nocturnal, and Susie and Abner never appeared in public together. Badger knew that for some unknown reason he had lost her, and this made him more persistent than ever in his attentions, being far too important in his own estimation to be discarded without good reason. Abner laughed to see his irritation. He and Susie laughed together in the night. ‘I can’t imagine whatever I saw in him,’ she said.

At the end of November Susie went away for a week to stay with her grandparents in Hereford. Without her the Pound House meant nothing to Abner, and without considering that his absence might be noticed, he drifted back into his old habit of returning to Wolfpits in the evening. It was now more than a month since he had done this, and in the interval he had scarcely spoken to Mary Malpas. Returning, and expecting to pick up the threads of the old life exactly as he had left them, he was surprised to find the atmosphere of Wolfpits curiously changed. The attitude of Mary herself was cold and unfriendly. He found it difficult to make headway against it, for she scarcely spoke to him, and even the children seemed to have become infected with their mother’s distrust. It was true that they had seen so little of him as almost to have forgotten him, but it seemed strange that his old favourite, Gladys, no longer came instinctively to his arms. He could not accept the change without a protest. One evening, finding Mary alone, he tackled her.

‘What’s come over you?’ he said.

‘Nothing’s come over me. What do you mean?’ she replied coldly.

‘Yo’m different . . . like you was scared of me. What have I done?’

‘You know best. You know what you told me . . . that night,’ she said, with tight lips.

‘That’s nothing to do with you,’ he said.

‘No . . . Nothing.’

‘Then what’s up with you?’

She laughed uneasily and went into the scullery. Abner was seized with sudden rage. It didn’t surprise him that George couldn’t get on with her. Mrs Malpas was right. She was trying to play the lady with him. With a woman like that it was useless trying to be frank. He could read suspicion into everything that she did. When Gladys, who was now regaining her confidence, climbed on to his knee, she followed the child with anxious eyes as though she feared that he would corrupt her. He determined to have the matter out with her, but she never gave him a chance, arranging carefully that they should never be alone. For this or for some other obscure reason she always invited her neighbour, Mrs Mamble, to come in and sit with her in the evening. This old woman, innocent of the strange relation between them, would sit in front of the fire talking incessantly of her dead husband and her distant relatives down Tenbury way. She had a brother who kept a small shop in a hamlet called Far Forest, and was never tired of talking of his importance as an elder of the local Wesleyan synod and the achievements of her nephew James, whom his father had destined for the ministry. The old woman tried to entertain them both with these recitals, but Abner had little patience with her, and tried to forget that she was there. He sat reading the football news in the last Sunday’s People; but even this could not shut out the sound of her slow, insistent voice. One night he asked for pen and paper and wrote a short but laborious note to Alice, enclosing a postal order for two pounds, which he had bought in Chapel Green. Mary watched him all the time that he was writing.

‘Ah, yo’m curious, bain’t yo’?’ he thought. ‘Pretending to take no heed of me, but yo’d give your eyes to see what I’ve written.’

Indeed she offered to post the letter for him; but he declined, putting it in his pocket with a laugh.

In the end he found these evenings at Wolfpits so uncomfortable that he was glad when Mick Connor inveigled him into a new expedition against Badger’s preserves. By this time the keeper had looked about him and made plans for defending his master’s property, so that the game was getting more dangerous every day. Badger had made friends with Constable Bastard, the new policeman, who had been drafted to Mainstone from Shrewsbury and looked upon poaching with the uncharitable eye of a townsman. To the great embarrassment of Mr Hind, who, not unreasonably, lived in terror of the licensing justices, and had not yet determined in what degree the new policeman was corruptible, Bastard began to take an interest in the customers of the Pound House, poking his whiskered face inside the taproom every evening and taking count of the company like a shepherd numbering his sheep. Mr Hind’s heart sank when he found that the constable was a teetotaller. The appearance of Bastard’s face in the doorway made him tremble for his licence, though these visits only meant that the keeper and the policeman were working together, hoping to identify the authors of each poaching outrage by establishing their absence from the Pound House.

The first expedition in which Abner took part during Susie’s visit to Hereford gave them a big haul. Abner’s own share of it was fifteen shillings, and, thus encouraged, they raided the keeper’s preserves on three nights in succession. The constable, checking the tale of drinkers at the Pound House, pointed out that Abner, Mick, Curly Atwell, and another had been absent on each of the nights in question, and that Mick had celebrated his return by recklessly standing treat to the whole taproom.

‘That young Fellows,’ said Bastard, ‘he’s not been nigh the place for more nor a week. For myself I’d say that he looks a quiet chap, but you never know . . . upon my word you don’t.’

‘The simpler they looks,’ said Badger emphatically, ‘the more they wants an eye kept on them. I’m pretty near certain I saw him that night they was arter the salmon.’

‘Never you fear!’ said the constable, ‘I’ll keep an eye on the lot.’

It never occurred to Badger, whose energies were centred for the present on one problem, to connect Abner’s absence from the Pound House with Susie’s visit to Hereford. He was an obstinate and not very intelligent man, thick-set in mind as in body, who had learnt his own craft thoroughly and knew little else. He had become aware of Susie’s coldness toward him before her departure, but he had not thought to explain it by her fancying another man. In any case the matter might wait. He could only do one thing at a time, and for the present he was too busy with Mick and his friends to waste good time in dangling round the Pound House. Perhaps it was only that Susie wanted more fuss made of her. All in good time . . .

After ten days she returned, and Abner began to visit the Pound House again. He found her imperious and exacting, she could not see too much of him. Bastard reported him to Badger as a regular attendant at the inn.‘You needn’t trouble about that young Fellows,’ he said. ‘He’s after other game.’

‘There’s no game here to speak on but ours,’ said Badger stupidly.

‘Ah, it’s a different kind I mean,’ said the constable. ‘That girl of Hind’s is looking after him. Any night of the week if you want to see a picture you can watch her take him in by the back door when the old man’s asleep upstairs.’

Badger went livid and swore so violently as to shock the constable’s principles.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, ‘not a word of it.’

‘Seeing’s believing,’ said Bastard. ‘At any rate seeing’s good enough for me.’

All thought of the poachers vanished from Badger’s single mind. He left the constable in the middle of their conversation and went straight to the Pound House, where he found Susie alone, making a petticoat from a pattern that she had bought in Hereford. She could see by his stormy entrance that something had upset him and switched on her most ingratiating manner.

‘Well, it is a time since I’ve seen you, Mr Badger,’ she said, laying aside her work. ‘Will you have something?’

He wouldn’t drink; he refused to waste time in preliminary skirmishing.

‘You’re not going to get round me that way,’ he said. ‘What’s this about you and that chap Fellows?’

‘Fellows?’ said Susie. ‘What Fellows is that?’

‘Now don’t start that game on me,’ said Badger angrily. ‘I’ve seen there was something up with you for the last month. Now I know what it is. You can’t go on like that with me. I’m not that kind of man.’

‘And I’m not that kind of girl, Mr Badger,’ said Susie. ‘I thought better of you, indeed I did.’

‘You can drop all that,’ said Badger, with a laugh. ‘You can let on you’re as innocent as a lamb, but I know better. Understand that!’

‘If that’s what you mean, I can tell you straight I’m not going to listen to your dirty tongue. I’m not accustomed to be spoke to by my friends like that.’ She rose indignantly and would have gone into the kitchen but he caught hold of her arm.‘You don’t deny it,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t demean myself.’ She tried to wrench away from him, but he would not let her go. The warmth of her arm on his fingers made him mad. He wanted to use her roughly. She cried out with pain.

‘Don’t!’ she cried. ‘You’re hurting me!’

He wanted to hurt her. He only held her tighter. ‘Where’s your father?’ he said.

‘Father’s gone out,’ she said. ‘Oh, let me go!’

‘Gone out, is he? Well, I’ll have a talk to him about this when he comes back. Then we’ll see . . .’

‘You can tell him all the dirty lies you like,’ she said defiantly.

But, in reality, his words had thrown her into a state of terror. That squat owl-faced father of hers was the one person on earth whom she dreaded. It came over her suddenly that somehow or other she must prevent his knowing, for though he had no objection to his daughter being free with men for the good of the house, she knew that he was anxious to keep on good terms with Badger and would be furious to think that she had taken up with a labouring man. Somehow she must flatter the keeper out of his intention; but she knew that a sudden change of front would be a manoeuvre too transparent. It pleased her, therefore, to give vent to the emotions which she had so far controlled and to break down in the most natural tears. She put her handkerchief to her eyes and sobbed violently.

Badger was bewildered by this but still determined.

‘You don’t get over me that way,’ he said. ‘Not if I know it!’

She went on sobbing, and the spectacle began to get on his nerves.

‘You can cry your eyes out, my girl, but I’m going to tell your father.’

She raised her eyes. ‘It’s not that!’ she said violently. ‘You can tell him any lie you like and it won’t make no difference to me. What I can’t stand is that you should think it of me . . . that you should think I’d go with a common chap like that. It’s cruel, Mr Badger . . . cruel! After the friends we’ve been. . .’

She put her hands on his shoulders and looked at him, pleading. His lust got the better of him and he took her violently in his arms. She submitted, and he began to forget his suspicions. She clung to him so that he could think of nothing but that she was desirable. Then, cunningly, gradually she became playful and childish, teasing him, indignant that he should have thought so ill of her. By the time that he left her she had convinced him that nothing could spoil their intimacy; but whatever she pretended she could not shake herself free from the fright he had given her. She felt that the time would never pass till she could see Abner and warn him.

It was no easy matter, for when the evening came and she began her work in the bar, moving among the drinkers with her usual smiling freedom, Badger was also there following her with hungry eyes as she went about her work. He sat in a corner, isolated, for none of the strangers would have anything to do with him. While serving a tot of gin to Gunner Eve she contrived to whisper to Abner, begging him to keep away from the house that night.

‘Why? What’s up?’ he said.

‘I can’t tell you,’ she whispered. ‘Come to-morrow early, before it’s light on your way to work. Just to please me!’

She spoke so urgently and with such evident distress that he obeyed her, and Badger, who had seen her bending over to speak to Abner, spent a cold night watching the back of the Pound House in vain. He might well have been better employed, for while he stood there shivering Mick Connor made free with half a dozen of his pheasants.

Next morning, in the half light of dawn, which made the cold kitchen look unspeakably sordid, she received Abner. The meeting had none of the warm glamour of their nightly love-making, and her anxiety made him impatient.

‘What the hell do I care for Badger?’ he said.

‘Oh, quiet . . . quiet! Don’t speak so loud!’ she implored him. She submitted to his embraces, but her mind was not with him.

‘I can’t think what’s up with you,’ he said.

His unconcern irritated her. ‘Can’t you understand?’ she said. ‘It’s better to do without me for a little than to lose me for good. That’s what would happen if father knew. He’d send me away to Hereford, to grandma’s. That’s what he’d do. Only for a week, Abner. After that, when he’s forgotten about it, things ’ll be better.’

Her distress was so real and she seemed so little to belong to him in her present state that he consented not to see her for a week.

‘Then I shan’t come a’nigh the place,’ he said. ‘I’m not goin’ to sit there looking at you and nothing after.’

‘Yes . . . that would be best,’ she said gladly. It inflamed him to think that she could take this complete divorce so calmly.

‘Better finish it off,’ he said.

Then she clung to him. ‘No, no, Abner. . . . I couldn’t bear that! Only a week, my love, only a week. . .’

He kept to his side of the bargain, and Badger was relieved to see him no more at the Pound House, although the suddenness of Abner’s abstention coloured his suspicions. What with his pheasants and the woman the keeper’s life was becoming too complicated for his intelligence, for Mick profited by Badger’s new devotion to Susie by ravaging his coverts. In this Abner, who had no other way of killing time, joined his friend, and on the last night of the week came a sharp but bloodless encounter in which the keeper was more than ever certain that he had seen Abner’s face. After this it became fixed in Badger’s mind that Abner was his principal enemy, the man who was obstinately working against him wherever he went. Somehow or other, he determined, he must get the better of him.

On the night when Abner returned to the Pound House, Badger was already there. Mick, as usual after a successful foray, was spending money freely, and by nine o’clock the room was full of excited men. Abner was ready to drink with the best of them, for his pockets were full of money and he had not been inside a pub for a week. To add to this uproarious assembly in came George Malpas, returning early from his own dark business in Lesswardine.

‘Go easy, boys,’ he said, as he entered, ‘that damned copper’s outside.’

But Mick Connor had by now gone too far to go easy. The liquor which in the early stages of intoxication merely rendered him funny now made him boastful, and the sight of Badger, glowering in his corner over a hot whisky, provided him with a subject for his wit. Atwell tried to keep him within bounds, but Mick, once fairly nourished, could talk the cross off an ass’s back. The laughter with which his sallies at the keeper’s expense were greeted stimulated him. He plunged into wild excesses of simile, while Badger sat sipping his whisky, going redder and redder as he listened. He knew that the whole room was against him; felt that before long he must do something to assert himself. If he went out into the road he would only be laughed at, but no man could sit there listening to Mick Connor without shame.

‘Wait while I’m tellin’ you,’ said Mick. ‘Over in Connemara there used to be an old gent named Hewish, a proper old sportsman. It was he that invented that game I’ve told you of . . . spider racing, spiders burning the legs off of them on a hot plate. Cock-fightin’ too. And badger-baitin’. I’m after tellin’ you that’s the sport for a man!’

A roar of laughter greeted him. ‘And so say all of us!’ said Mick insolently, staring into Badger’s corner. Badger pushed aside the table and rose to his feet. His glass went down with a crash.

‘Oh, Mr Badger!’ Susie cried.

‘Gard! The baste’s afther turning on me!’ cried Mick. ‘All together, boys!’

Badger pushed his way through the crowd to Mick. The Irishman lowered his head and butted him in the stomach like a ram. Badger, falling, saw Abner’s smiling face and lashed out at it. The two men went down together, fighting on the floor. Susie rushed into the kitchen, calling for her father, and at the same moment the constable ran into the room. He began to try and pinion Abner, who had Badger on the floor.

‘Leave them alone,’ cried George Malpas excitedly. ‘Badger hit him first!’ He took hold of the policeman’s shoulder, and tried to pull him back.

‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ Bastard shouted. ‘Obstructing my duty?’

But George would not let him go. The policeman left Abner and closed with Malpas. He was the taller, but the older man. They swayed in each other’s arms and then, tripping on the leg of an overturned chair, went down together. The policeman was undermost and his head hit the stone floor with a dull thud. George, who had fallen above him, freed himself from his arms.

‘The b—’s stunned,’ said Atwell. ‘Serve him right!’

Mr Hind had appeared on the scene and was bending over the prostrate policeman. George leaned panting against the bar.

‘There’s blood coming from his ears and nose,’ Mr Hind said hoarsely.

‘The b—’s stunned,’ Atwell repeated stolidly.

‘He’s not stunned,’ said the landlord, looking up. ‘He’s dead!’

By this time Abner had got the better of the keeper, whom he held beneath him on the floor. He heard the crash as George Malpas and Constable Bastard went over amid a hubbub of voices. Then, with the landlord’s words, which Abner did not hear, fell a sudden silence. He wondered what was up, released Badger, and pushed forward to the cluster of men that surrounded the policeman’s body. He heard the word ‘dead’ passing from one to another. ‘Lock at the blood coming out of his ear,’ they said. And there was George Malpas leaning up against the bar with his hands behind him gripping it, ghastly pale and panting with his mouth open, and twitching at the corners. He didn’t see Abner or any one else. A curious inertia had fallen on the group of men about Bastard’s body. They simply stared at it as though it had fallen into the midst of them from another planet. Mr Hind, by way of an experiment, lifted the constable’s hand and let it fall again. It fell on the floor with a wooden sound.

‘Somebody run to Lesswardine for the doctor,’ said Mr Hind.

‘I’ll go myself,’ said Abner.

‘That’s right. Tell ’im about the blood, and be’s quick as you can.’

‘It’s snowing,’ some one called.

Abner went hatless to the door. Looking back into the kitchen he saw the face of Susie. It was white, like a mask. For the moment it meant nothing to him. They looked at each other for that fraction of a second unrecognising. Abner started running toward Lesswardine. The hard road echoed. The night was deadly black and snow was falling.

He scarcely noticed the snow. He went on plodding over the road to Lesswardine without realising, for the time, the importance of his journey. He felt the snowflakes spatter his face, his neck, his chest, for in the struggle with Badger his shirt had been torn open. He was glad he had come to grips with Badger. He felt he could do what he liked with the keeper now. The white-faced vision of Susie, till then unrealised, came back to him out of the darkness. Scared, she must have been!

In Lesswardine yellow lamps beamed through halos of cold air. Crossing the bridge he saw that his clothes were as white as a miller’s. The great flakes danced like moths in the lamplight, they flew into his mouth and melted on the heat of his tongue. His feet did not echo in these new streets, for the macadam was felted with an inch of snow. He had nearly reached his goal. It was senseless to go on running, panting, and swallowing mouthfuls of snow; but his legs would not obey these half-formed thoughts and carried him onwards.

The doctor was smoking his after-supper pipe when Abner arrived. The Hinds were good patients, and he did not hesitate to turn out. ‘Give me a hand with the mare,’ he said, and they went out into the stable to put to. The doctor’s wife had warmed his overcoat and wrapped a muffler round his neck. He gave Abner a peg of whisky to keep him warm. When they were clear of the Lesswardine lights he asked for details of the affair. ‘By Gad, that’s serious,’ he said. ‘That means an inquest and a P.M.’ He thought to himself: ‘Two guineas,’ and touched up the mare with satisfaction.

‘You say Bastard and George Malpas went down together? He was struggling with George?’

‘Yes—it was me and Badger he was after.’

‘That’s beside the point,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s a bad lookout for Malpas—and for his mother, poor old lady! A bad lookout. . . . It’s homicide—manslaughter.’