THE LONG TRAIL
It was ‘betwixt the lights,’ as he would have said, when the miller closed the door quietly behind him and made his way among the nut-bushes to the ford where his search for the otter usually began. No track marked the ground by the water’s edge, nor was there a sign on any of the likely spots all the way to the stranded alder, where he sat to rest awhile before resuming his beat. The pine-tops were then aglow and the birds in full song, but they meant nothing to him in the mood he was in; his thoughts, as his words showed, were all for the otter.
‘Not a trace. Pools full of fish, too, and everythin’ as keenly as can be. Yet I’m sure he’s up, and sartin he’ll be spurred afore the day’s much older. Wonder who’ll be the lucky man?’
At the thought of his rivals he sprang to his feet and soon had reached the precipitous bank above the shelving strand where, though so many landing-places were undisturbed, he had every hope of coming on the tracks. Most carefully the eager eyes examined every foot of sand visible between the rowan-trees as, slowly on hands and knees, the miller advanced towards the bend which commands the likeliest spot of all. There twenty feet below he saw a salmon lying and, with the same glance, marked the tracks beside it. The descent of the scarp was nearly as perilous as the crossing of the current, but he accomplished both without mishap, and a few seconds later was crouching beside the footprints.
‘By the life of me they’re his, and not many hours old.’
His face, no less than his agitated voice, showed the wild excitement that possessed him as he rose and made down the wood as fast as he could lay foot to ground. When he reached the mill he was almost at his last gasp, but he bridled and mounted the pony, which he urged to a gallop through the open gate and up the stony lane. He was on his way to the squire.
As he rode through the hamlet, where the clatter of the hoofs brought the villagers to door and window, his cries of ‘Tracked un!’ roused man and boy to a fever of excitement, and sent the sexton in hot haste to the belfry to apprize the country-side. The miller, however, leaving them behind, was soon at the lodge gates. There he nearly frightened old Jenny into hysterics by his shouts; but she took her revenge, for after letting him through she shook the keys in his face and screamed after him, ‘Mad as a curley! mad as a curley!’ until he rounded the bend where the mansion comes into view. The whole house seemed asleep; but as the miller crossed the bridge over the moat the squire appeared at a window and, in a voice that betrayed the tension of his feelings, called out:
‘Where?’
‘Fresh?’