Corn harvest was coming near, and he crossed a field of his own wheat into a field of Bowden’s oats. Steer was the only farmer round about who grew wheat. Wheat! In Bowden’s view it was all his politics! But Steer was thinking: ‘My wheat’s lookin’ well—don’t think much of these oats' (another of his ‘foreign expressions’; oats were ‘corn’ to Bowden). ‘He’ll have no straw.’
He had not been in Bowden’s yard since the day he executed the yellow whippet dog, and his calf twitched—the brute had given it a shrewd nip.
The girl Pansy opened the door to him. And, seeing the flush rise into her pale cheeks, he thought: ‘If I were to lay my stick across your back you’d know it, my girl.’
Bowden had just finished his supper of bacon, beans and cider, and was smoking his pipe before the embers of a wood fire. He did not get up, and there seemed to Steer something studied and insulting in the way he nodded to a chair. He sat down with his stick across his knees, while the girl went quickly out.
“Butiful evenin’,” said Bowden. “Fine weather for the corn. Drink o’ cider?”
Steer shook his head. The cautious man was making sure of his surroundings before he opened fire. Old Mrs. Bowden sat in her chair by the hearth with her little old back turned to the room. Bowden’s white-headed bobtail was stretched out with his chin on his paws; a yellow cat crouched, still as the Sphinx, with half-closed eyes; nothing else was alive, except the slow-ticking clock.
Steer held up the amethyst ring.
“See this?”
Undisturbed by meaning or emotion, Bowden’s face was turned slowly towards the ring.