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.