It was now winter, and the dispute was still dragging on. There had been no further fence-burning, but the Member for the constituency had been memorialised, a joint meeting had been held in the Llanyglo schoolroom, and he had promised to come down and see for himself how matters stood. Until he should do so the disputants glared, so to speak, at one another. A certain element of contempt, that looked at first like tolerance, had even entered into the quarrel. Thus, a section of fence on a portion of the sandhills that it would have been a positive inconvenience to visit was allowed to stand. Llanyglo preferred to reserve its strength. But elsewhere the stakes lay half buried in the sand, and John Willie Garden now and then wondered what sort of a raft they would make.
"The whole thing looks like being a damned bad spec," the Syndicate grumbled.
That opinion seemed to be gaming strength.
There seemed to be more than a chance that Llanyglo, its heathery Trwyn and its purple mountains, its unproductive sandhills and its non dividend-paying sea, would be written off by Terry's Syndicate as a total loss.
Then, all in a night, something astonishing happened at Llanyglo.
The words "all in a night" are to be understood in their very plainest sense. Granted that it was a winter's night, and therefore a long one, with the darkness setting in soon after four and the sun not coming up behind the mountains again until nearly eight; none the less the fact remained that Llanyglo went to bed as usual, and woke up to rub its eyes, unable to believe what it so plainly saw. What had happened was this:
With Edward Garden's house-roof still a toast-rack against the wintry sky, and his slates just as they had been left after Eesaac Oliver's last long-division sum, and only half the staircase yet fitted, and the little socket John Willie had scooped out under the date-stone still awaiting its sixpence—with all this arrested as life and growth and motion were arrested in the Enchanted Palace, the first new house had gone up in Llanyglo. Where had been nothing the night before, there it now was, staring at them when the sun rose, a house, with smoke coming out of its chimney.
That same friend of Squire Wynne's who repeated to the author of the Sixpenny Guide the Squire's remark about invasion viâ the Mersey, told him also what a Welsh "Hafod Unos" is.
"You know what the words mean," he said. "Strictly speaking, it's the summer-house—pavilion—shelter—of a night. The essentials are that it must be built on common land, and in a single night. Then they can't eject you. At least that's the idea. Don't ask me how it stands in Law. It may be a kind of squatter's right, or anything else, or it may have no standing at all. Probably it hasn't. But that's neither here nor there. They have their notions about it, and those at any rate are immemorial. Look here: you're pottering about this country just now; just count how many houses you find with the name 'Hafod Unos.' You'll find quite a lot. There's a very big one Bangor way, that probably took some years to build, but probably one of these places was its foundation.... And a house 'within the meaning of the Act,' so to speak, means that smoke must have gone up the chimney. Cook your breakfast there, and—well, after that you're a sort of tolerated freeholder. It might be worth putting into your Guide Book. You'd better add a footnote, though, that the 'f' in 'hafod' is a 'v,' and 'unos' is pronounced 'innos.' ... Not at all; you're welcome to any help I can give you——"