“Good morning, Miss Priscilla!” said Will the Driver, lifting his whip with a brave salute. Cilla of the Good Intent was his favourite passenger, and he had seen her, with the quick eye of friendship, as soon as he had turned the corner.
He got down to help the ostler with the buckets; for his team of three were mettled horses, and Garth was the baiting-stage on their journey up to Keta’s Well, and Will would never admit that the business could be rightly done unless he bore a hand in it himself.
There were seats for eight at the top of the coach, but Reuben Gaunt, though all were empty this morning, did not choose to sit beside the driver. He handed Priscilla, by way of the yellow-painted wheel, into the rearmost seat and clambered up beside her.
“Not on horseback this morning, Mr. Gaunt?” said the driver, who had a word for every one and knew each dalesman’s habits.
“No, there’s good in changing, Will,” laughed the other, “if ’tis only out of one coat into another. A fine spring morning, this, for sitting on a seat instead of on the top of a horse’s temper.”
“Ay, my cattle, too, are feeling young Spring come back into their bones. Terrible wild to handle this morning, Mr. Gaunt. You’ll soon be up at Keta’s Well, I fancy.” He gathered the reins into his hands, looked round with a cheery nod to the knot of idlers gathered about the inn, and was starting forward when Widow Lister ran crying down the highroad.
“Here, Will! Nay, lad, you surely wouldn’t have gone and left my bit of a basket behind?”
“How was I to know you were coming?” said Will, pulling up and surveying the woman’s apple-red face—a face brimming over just now with jollity.
“Should’st have guessed,” she went on briskly. “And me a lone widow, too—and to have run myself all out o’ breath at my age, just to catch a young man who does naught for his living save sit on a seat and let himself be carried.”
A placid titter went up from the onlookers.