It was early in December, a showery, blustry afternoon; but I was sitting out of doors in the hay. The men had been cutting away the great rick in the haggard; they had taken a slice off it, down almost to the ground, and I had burrowed myself a comfortable bed among the soft trusses, with my back against the bristling, newly shorn wall of hay that towered above me like a gable. The dogs were standing beside me in different attitudes of intensest attention, their eyes fixed, like mine, upon a hole in the foundations of the rick, from which at this moment a pair of legs in corduroys and gaiters were protruding.
“Have you come to them yet?” I called out.
A muffled grunt was all that I could hear in answer; but after a moment or two, the body belonging to the legs was drawn out of the hole.
“I’ve got one of the brutes,” said Willy, holding up his hand, with a ferret hanging limply from it. “I don’t know how I’ll get the other; those rats must be miles back in the rick. I’ll have to go up for one of the young Sweenys to help me to move some of the stones under the rick.”
“I think in that case I shall go home,” I said. “I suppose you’ll take hours over it.”
“Oh no! Do wait a bit; we won’t be any time. You can have my coat if you’re cold,” said Willy, dropping the reclaimed ferret into its bag. “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
He climbed the wall of the haggard, and took a short cut across the field to where the whitewashed walls of Sweeny’s cottage showed through the red twigs of the leafless fuchsia hedge that incongruously surrounded it.
I took out my watch as soon as he had started, and saw that it was half-past three. Willy seemed to have forgotten that this Tuesday afternoon was the one on which Nugent had said he would come over. I had taken care to say something about it at breakfast, but had done it so lamely and inopportunely that I was not sure whether Willy had heard me; and a kind of awkwardness had prevented me from reminding him of it when he had asked me after luncheon to come out with him to the haggard, where a thriving colony of rats had been that morning discovered.
Willy and I were now on terms of the most absolute intimacy. His daily companionship had become second nature to me—something which I accepted as a matter of course, which gave me no trouble, and was in all ways pleasant. But, for all that, I had begun to find out that in some occult way I was a little afraid of him. He was unexpectedly and minutely observant, and, where I was concerned, appeared to be able to take in my doings with the back of his head. It was this gift, combined with his unostentatious acuteness, that made me sometimes feel foolish when I least wished it, and lately had made any mention of Nugent’s name a difficulty to me.
At all events, at this particular moment I did not feel disposed to explain matters, and I settled myself again in the hay, hoping that the capture of the ferret would allow me, by the natural course of things, to get home in time without having to remind Willy of my expected visitor.