Simon straightened his bent shoulders. The young light was in his eyes again. He looked comely; for a man at bay shows always the qualities that are hidden by sleek prosperity. “Well, yes,” he said; “but Martha happens to be worth twenty of you silly kitchen wenches—that’s why I chose her.”
The pert maid took up a clout from the table, aimed it at Simon, and missed him by three feet or so.
“The master could teach you a lesson,” he chuckled. “We’ve been up the pastures these days, shooting. And master has got a bee in his bonnet, like, about this gunshot business. ‘Simon,’ he says to me, no further back than yesterday, ‘there’s nothing matters, except to see straight and to aim straight. We may be needed by and by.’”
It was so that Simon got away, and went out a conqueror for his little moment, because he had silenced the strife of women’s tongues. Across the darkness of the mistal-yard a lanthorn came glimmering fitfully, as Martha crossed from the byres to the house.
“Well, Martha?” said Foster, striding into the flickering belt of light.
“Well, Simon?” she answered, without surprise. She was no lass in her teens, to think that grown men welcome fright; and so she did not scream, sudden as his intrusion was.
“I’ve been thinking, lass.”
“And so have I. The roan cow is easier, thanks to me; and all the while I put the salt-bags on, and cosseted her, and teased her back to health, I thought a deal, Simon.”
“What, of me?” he asked, with a sprightly air.
An owl, far down the sloping fields, sounded her call as she swooped to kill rats and field-mice for her larder. And Martha, though the light from her lanthorn was dim enough to hide it, could not forego a touch of coquetry.