Dusk was growing to dark, but the boy stepped fearlessly, well knowing his path. The last throstle sang his last evensong for the year, and was still. The shadowy trees, so living and so silent about him: the wrestling trunks of beeches, the reaching arms of oak and hornbeam, all struck at gaze as though pausing in their everlasting struggle to watch and whisper as he passed: and the black depths between them: might well have oppressed the imagination of such a boy from other parts; but Johnny tramped along among them little heeding, thinking of the great ship-haunted London he longed for, and forecasting nothing of the blow that should fall but in that hour and send him the journey sorrowing.
Presently he was aware of a light ahead. It moved a foot or two from the ground, and Johnny knew its swing. Then it stopped, resting by a tree root. “You, gran’dad?” called Johnny, and “Hullo!” came the old man’s voice in answer.
The old man had cut a leaf, with a caterpillar on it, from a shrub, and was packing it in a pill-box. “Out for a few night-feeders,” he explained, as the boy stopped beside him. “But you ain’t been home to tea,” he added. “Takin’ home the sloes? Might ha’ left ‘em till the morning, John, easy,—now you’ve got ‘em.”
“Oh, I come up from over there”—Johnny made a vague toss of the arm—“an’ I thought I might as well cut across to Theydon first. Bess went up the lane. I’ll be home ‘fore ye now, gran’dad, ‘nless you ‘re goin’ back straight.”
“I won’t be long behind ye; I’m just goin’ to the Pits. I can’t make nothin’ o’ them I took last night, under the brambles an’ heather,—never saw the like before quite; so I’m goin’ to see if there’s more, an’ get all I can.”
They walked together a few yards, till the trees thinned. “You’ll go ‘cross the Slade,” said the old man. “Step it, or you’ll be beat!”
“I’ll step it,” the boy answered. “I want my tea.”
He was trotting home by the lane from Theydon, with his empty basket on his arm, and his hands (and the sixpence) in his trousers pockets, when he checked at a sound, as of a cry from the wood. But he heard no more, and trotted on. Probably the deer were fighting somewhere; rare fighters were the bucks in October.
CHAPTER IV.
JOHNNY had finished his tea, and was lying at his ease in the old easy-chair, whistling, rattling his heels on the hearth, and studying a crack in the ceiling that suggested an angry face. Mrs. May had put the sixpence the sloes had brought into the cracked teacup that still awaited the return of Uncle Isaac’s half-crown, had washed the tea-things, and was now mending the worn collar of gran’dad’s great-coat, in readiness for the winter. Bessy had fallen asleep over her book, had been wakened, had fallen asleep again, and in the end had drowsily climbed the stairs to early bed: but still the old man did not return.
“I wonder gran’dad ain’t back yet,” Johnny’s mother said for the third time. “He said he’d be quick, so’s to finish that case to-night.” This was a glass-topped mahogany box, in course of setting with specimens of all the Sphinges: a special private order.
“‘Spect he can’t find them caterpillars he went for,” Johnny conjectured; “that’s what it is. He’s forgot all about racin’ me home.”
Mrs. May finished the collar, lifted the coat by the loop, and turned it about in search of rents. Finding none, she put it down and stood at the door, listening. “Think you’re too tired to go an’ look for him, Johnny?” she asked presently.
Johnny thought he was. “It’s them caterpillars, safe enough,” he said. “He never saw any before, an’ it was just a chance last night. To-night he can’t find ‘em, and he’s keepin’ on searchin’ all over the Pits and the Slade; that’s about it.”
There was another pause, till Mrs. May remembered something. “The bit o’ candle he had in the lantern wouldn’t last an hour,” she said. “He’d ha’ had to come back for more. Johnny, I’m gettin’ nervous.”
“Why, what for?” asked Johnny, though the circumstance of the short candle startled his confidence. “He might get a light from somewhere else, ‘stead o’ comin’ all the way back.”
“But where?” asked Mrs. May. “There’s only the Dun Cow, an’ he might almost as well come home—besides, he wouldn’t ask ‘em.”
Johnny left the chair, and joined his mother at the door. As they listened a more regular sound made itself plain, amid the low hum of the trees; footsteps. “Here he comes,” said Johnny.
But the sound neared and the steps were long and the tread was heavy. In a few moments Bob Smallpiece’s voice came from the gloom, wishing them good-night.
Mrs. May called to him. “Have you seen gran’dad anywhere, Mr. Smallpiece?”
The keeper checked his strides, and came to the garden gate, piebald with the light from the cottage door. “No,” he said, “I ain’t run across him, nor seen his light anywheres. Know which way he went?”
“He was just going to Wormleyton Pits an’ back, that’s all.”
“Well, I’ve just come straight across the Pits, an’ as straight here as ever I could go, past the Dun Cow; an’ ain’t seen ne’er a sign of him. Want him particular?”
“I’m gettin’ nervous about him, Mr. Smallpiecesomehow I’m frightened to-night. He went out about six, an’ now it don’t want much to nine, an’ he only had a bit o’ candle that wouldn’t bum an hour. And he never meant stopping long, I know, ‘cause of a case he’s got to set. I thought p’raps you might ha’ seen—”
“No, I see nothin’ of him. But I’ll go back to the Pits now, if you like, an’ welcome.”
“I’d be sorry to bother you, but I would like someone to go. Here, Johnny, go along, there’s a good boy.”
“All right, all right,” the keeper exclaimed cheerfully. “We’ll go together. I expect he’s invented some new speeches o’ moth, an’ he’s forgot all about his light, thinkin’ out the improvements. It ain’t the first time he’s been out o’ night about here, anyhow. Not likely to lose himself, is Mr. May.”
Johnny had his cap and was at the gate; and in a moment the keeper and he were mounting the slope.
“Mother’s worryin’ herself over nothing to-night,” Johnny grumbled. “Gran’dad’s been later ‘n this many’s a time, an’ she never said a word. Why, when he gets after caterpillars an’ things he forgets everything.”
They walked on among the trees. Presently, “How long is it since your father died?” Bob Smallpiece asked abruptly.
“Nine years, now, and more.”
“Mother might ha’ married agen, I s’pose?”
“I dunno. Very likely. Never heard her say nothing.”
Bob Smallpiece walked on with no more reply than a grunt. Soon a light from the Dun Cow twinkled through the bordering coppice, and in a few paces they were up at the wood’s edge.
“No light along the road,” the keeper said, glancing to left and right, and making across the hard gravel.
“There’s somebody,” Johnny exclaimed, pointing up the pale road.
“Drunk,” objected the other. And truly the indistinct figure staggered and floundered. “An’ goin’ the wrong way. Chap just out o’ the