But that fourth finger of Bob Chowne’s settled it as to the time, for it was not in 1755 but in 1752, for there’s the date on the old parchment, which sets forth how the whole of the Gap from the foreshore right up the little river for five hundred yards inland, and the whole of the steep cliff slope and precipice, each side, to the very top, was conveyed to my father, Arthur John Duncan, of Oak Cottage, Wistabay, lieutenant and commander in the Royal Navy of His Most Gracious Majesty King George the Second.
It doesn’t matter in the least when it was, only I may as well say when, any more than it does that everybody who knew my father, including Doctor Chowne of Ripplemouth, said he must be mad to go and buy, at the sale of Squire Allworth’s estate, a wild chasm of a place, all slaty rock and limestone crag and rift and hollow, with a patch of scraggy oak-trees here, some furze and heath there, and barely enough grass to feed half a dozen sheep, and that, even if it was cheap, because no one else would buy it, he was throwing good money away.
But I didn’t think so that hot midsummer afternoon when I was back home, and had set out to explore the place as I had never explored it before.
That was not saying much, for I pretty well knew the spot by heart, but it was my father’s now—“ours.”
We three boys had ridden home together the day before, sitting on our boxes in Teggley Grey’s cart, for he was the carrier from Ripplemouth to Barnstaple.
I say we rode, though it wasn’t much of a ride, for every now and then the red-faced old boy used to draw the corner of his lips nearly out to his ears, and show us how many yellow stumps of teeth he had left, as he stopped his great bony horse, to say:
“I’m sure you young chaps don’t want my poor old horse to pull you up a hill like this.”
Of course we jumped down and walked up the hill, and as it was nearly all hill from Barnstaple to our homes we were always jumping down, and walked quite half of the twenty miles.
Old Teggley must begin about it too, as he sat with his chin nearly down upon his knees, whisking the flies away from his horse’s ears with his whip.
“We’m bit puzzled, Mas’ Sep Duncan, what your father bought that place for?”