“Say, mate, where are you bound for?” he asked, in a rough but good-humoured fashion.
“Farmer Purcell’s, at the Garth Farm,” said the driver.
“Sorry to stop you,” cried the other, standing aside; “I thought as I would hail you as you passed, for if so be as you had been going my way I should have made bold to ask you for a passage.”
His excuse was an absurd one, since it was evident that our little trap was as full as it could be, but my driver did not seem disposed to argue. He drove on without a word, and, looking back, I could see the stranger sitting by the roadside and cramming tobacco into his pipe.
“A sailor,” said I.
“Yes, maister. We’re not more than a few miles from Morecambe Bay,” the driver remarked.
“You seemed frightened of him,” I observed.
“Did I?” said he, drily; and then, after a long pause, “Maybe I was.” As to his reasons for fear, I could get nothing from him, and though I asked him many questions he was so stupid, or else so clever, that I could learn nothing from his replies. I observed, however, that from time to time he swept the moors with a troubled eye, but their huge brown expanse was unbroken by any moving figure. At last in a sort of cleft in the hills in front of us I saw a long, low-lying farm building, the centre of all those scattered flocks.
“Garth Farm,” said my driver. “There is Farmer Purcell himself,” he added, as a man strolled out of the porch and stood waiting for our arrival. He advanced as I descended from the trap, a hard, weather-worn fellow with light blue eyes, and hair and beard like sun-bleached grass. In his expression I read the same surly ill-will which I had already observed in my driver. Their malevolence could not be directed towards a complete stranger like myself, and so I began to suspect that my uncle was no more popular on the north-country fells than he had been in Stepney Highway.
“You’re to stay here until nightfall. That’s Mr. Stephen Maple’s wish,” said he, curtly. “You can have some tea and bacon if you like. It’s the best we can give you.”