“Sorry to hear he’s been in a trap; you’ve no idea, I suppose.”
“Noane at all, sir.”
All the way across the heather to his cottage, Andrew thought of what the Squire had said, but reflection did not shake the confidence he felt in his plan. More than once, when he had lain hidden on the bank of the stream, an otter had swum past within a few feet of him without betraying the least alarm. Of course, he had kept as still as death. Almost in the twinkling of an eye the Earthstopper can become as rigid as a rock, and so disarm the suspicion of the shyest of wild creatures, provided they don’t get wind of him. He is in sight of his cottage now, but he is still defending his plan against the Squire.
“Well, ’spose the wust, say eh is skeared, what do it matter? Hee’d be back in they theere cliffs long afore the hounds could come anist un, an’ I’ll warn ee, with a bellyful of the Squire’s trout.”
Rightly or wrongly, he determined to try to head the otter back, and even first to lie in ambush and see it pass on its way to the lake. But where?
It was this he was considering as he sat smoking his pipe over a glass of beer in the parlour of the “One and All,” the morning before the meet. Save for Vennie, who was curled up under the window seat, he was all alone. Not that “Maddern” men don’t like a glass of beer, but the leisure hours of an Earthstopper are not those of ordinary toilers; so that he had nothing to break in on his thoughts but the tinkle of the blacksmith’s anvil, and the clear tenor voice of the parson who was trying over some chants in his study behind the shrubbery. Sitting there, the Earthstopper could see, as though it lay spread before him, the tranquil lake, its tiny bays and miniature headlands, the silver thread of the stream as it flows through croft, woodland, orchard and meadow on its way to the sea, and every overhanging tree and bordering bush.
What memories intruded on his thoughts as he searched the banks for an ambush! how vivid were those of long ago!
In a patch of furze near the stepping-stones he had found a long-tailed tit’s nest when he was a lad; in the dark pool under the bridge a big trout had carried away his hook and two strands of new gut; under the spray from the water falling from the wheel, during the great flood, he had caught his only salmon peal; between the apple blossoms that nearly kissed across the mill stream his young eyes had first followed the flight of a kingfisher.
Skipping the rising ground between the coombes, he lit on the track on the silt, and instantly he reproached himself, as he had done again and again, for having, in a moment of excitement, held the leaves of the iris and tainted them with human scent.