“I wouldn’t if I was a zojer, sir. Poor beggars’ liberty’s sweet, and may be if they got away they’d turn over a new leaf. No, zir, I wouldn’t zhoot ’em, and I wouldn’t let out to the warders which way a runaway had gone. I’d scorn it,” said the man, giving his horse a tremendous lash in his excitement.
“It does seem a cowardly thing to do.”
“Cowardly, zir? It’s worse,” said the man, indignantly. “I call it the trick of a zneak; but the people about here do it fast enough for the zake of the reward.”
“There, zir, I told you so,” continued the man, after a quarter of an hour’s progress, during which he had been pointing out pieces of scenery to inattentive ears. “The fog’ll be on uz in vive minutes more.”
They were descending a sharp hill as the man spoke, and in half the time he had named they were in the midst of a dense vapour, so thick that Luke fully realised the necessity for stopping if they wished to avoid an accident.
“I think we can get down here, zir, and across the next bit of valley, and then it will perhaps be clearer as we get higher up. Anyhow we’ll try.”
Keeping the horse at a walk, he drove cautiously on, finished the descent, went along a level for a short distance, and then they began once more to ascend.
“I’ll try it for two or three hundred yards, zir,” said the man, “and then if it don’t get better we must stop and chance it.”
What he meant by chancing it the driver did not explain, but as with every hundred yards they went the fog seemed thicker, he suddenly drew the rein and pulled his horse’s nose-bag from beneath the seat.
“If you’ll excuse me, zir, I’d get inside if I was you, and wait patiently till the wind springs up. These fogs are very raw and cold, and rheumaticky to strangers, and you arn’t got your great-coat on.”