Part of that load consisted of a new turf-cutting spade and a small glazed window for his hut. His newly-discovered need for these took him among dealers in hardware and carpenters, until he found what else he went for. He drove hard bargains, and paid in part with winter store of peat; but he carried away more than the dealers supposed. In the one place he observed a full set of implements for husbandry put aside, and roughly labelled, 'Evan Evans, Castella, Paid,' and was told they had so lain, 'lumbering up the place,' for fully three weeks, the buyer not having turned up to claim them, although he had stated he intended to take them up the river by boat when the tide served.
A crusty carpenter, who had two glass windows exposed for sale, was glad to let one of them go as a bargain, seeing that the man for whom they were made in a hurry three weeks before had disappeared mysteriously, and not even gone back to his inn, on St. Mary's Quay, for his horse.
That bit of information about the inn had sent the turf-cutter tramping across the town with his beasts, sure, at least, of much-needed rest and provender, all houses of the kind, in those days of horseback travel and pack-horse conveyance, having ample stable accommodation.
A warm supper, more plentiful than dainty, had been supplied to him in the common room, odorous of tobacco-smoke, rum, cwrw, tar, and salt water.
Presently a voice he knew hailed him from out the smoke-reek.
'Do that be you, Robert Jones? 'Deed, you're the very man to tell the landlord here who owns an old horse left here three weeks ago by a farming-man, who called himself Evan Evans, of Eglwysilan, and went off without paying his score, look you!'
'Ah, how did he go off?'
'Queerly. He said as he was going to hire a boat to carry the horse and some goods of his, as he was be taking to Castella, across the river in the morning, but he never did come back here.'
'No,' chimed in the landlord, 'nor never did mean it, or he would not have been going off in the Osprey's boat, as he surely did.'
''Deed no! not if he did go of his own free will,' came from a feeble voice in a corner; 'but I've heard as'—