But John Willie knew that they were not going to bed. The door had not been closed so quickly but that he had seen a dozen men crowding the kitchen, and Dafydd Dafis's eyes, hollower than ever in the light of the candle that stood at his elbow, with a sentimental and knife-like gleam in them as they turned.
The next morning, every stake that those two Porth Neigr men had driven in had been uprooted again, and a board with "Rhybudd" on it lay down the beach, already lapped by the rising tide.
It was once told to the writer of The Visitors' Sixpenny Guide to Llanyglo and Neighbourhood—a young man with so little regard for his bread and butter that he made a labour of love of a job that brought him in exactly ten pounds—it was once told to this over-conscientious author, by a man who had known Squire Wynne very well, that the Squire, finding himself one day in Liverpool, and taking a walk to the docks with an acquaintance in the Royal Engineers, pointed down the Mersey past New Brighton, and said, "Do you know, I've sometimes had the idea that if this country was ever invaded the enemy would come up there?"—"But surely," exclaimed his friend, "it's a difficult piece of navigation?"—"Yes," the Squire replied, "but half the pilots are Welshmen."
No doubt the Squire said it without accepting too much responsibility for it. No doubt, too, he would not have allowed anybody else to suggest that Wales might slyly open a back-door into England. But that there was something, much or little, in it, the famous Llanyglo Inclosures Dispute, that now began, lasted off and on for three years, and then came to an end in as fantastic a manner as you could conceive, seemed to show.
For that dispute would not have been so obstinate and envenomed had it been simply a question of grazing, turbary, and right-of-way. True, there might still have been the fence-destruction and gate-burning that presently filled John Willie Garden's heart with a fearful joy; but—and this is what made the difference—Owen Glyndwr and his triumph over Mortimer would not have been dragged in, nor Taliesin and his prophecy, nor Howell Dda, nor Gruffydd ap Rhys, nor Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, nor a hundred other grey and valiant and unforgotten ghosts of princes and saints and bards whose names string (as it were) all Wales, from Braich-y-Pwll to St. David's Head, making of it one Western Harp in which the wind of sentiment is never still.
For these fences on the Llanyglo sandhills were not fences—they were Saxon fences. They were not notice-boards and gates—they were the insulting tokens of invasion and rapine and defeat. The Welshman says of himself that he is able to keep only that which he has lost, and, in Dafydd Dafis's view of it, at all events, not a piratical Liverpool Syndicate, but a marauding Saesneg king had come again.
On the evening of the day on which those fences were laid flat again, John Willie went once more to Pritchard's farm, and this time was not refused admittance. Perhaps nobody either saw or heard him enter. As if it had been put there for a signal, a single candle in a flat tin stick stood among the geraniums in the little square window-recess, and, save for a dull glow from the shell of peats on the hearth, that was the only light in the room. Again seven or eight men were gathered there, some sitting on the hard old horsehair sofa, two on the table, and others crouched or standing in corners; and the candle-light rested here on a bit of lustre-ware, there on a chair knob, and elsewhere on a cheekbone or the knuckles of a hand. It barely reached Dafydd Dafis, who sat in the farthest corner, with his cap on his head and his head resting against a Post Office proclamation that hung on the wall. No sound could be heard save the loud tock-tocking of the tall clock with the in-turned scrolls on the top and the gilt pippin between them.
John Willie thought it would be more grown-up to accept their silence and to share their motionlessness. He set his elbows on the dresser and sank his neck between his shoulders. The shadow of great John Pritchard, who sat on the sofa's end, covered John Willie and half the wall behind him as well, and John Willie's eyes only discovered Dafydd Dafis in the farther corner when Dafydd moved. As he moved, a bit of gilt fluting dipped forward out of the gloom of the chimney-corner. Dafydd had his harp.
The next moment a single thrumming note had broken out. It was followed by a soft chord of three or four more....