"Afraid! Not I. No certainly not, after mountains, and forests, and caverns, and deserts. But the distance, Master Hopper, for a man of my age, and troubled with rheumatism in the knee-joint."
"Oh, that's all right! I have planned out all that. Of course I don't expect you to go ten miles an hour. But Baker Channing's light cart goes, every other Saturday, to Crooked-post quarry, at the further end of Hagdon, to fetch back furze enough to keep his oven going, from a stack he bought there last summer. To-morrow is his day; and you have no school, you know, after half-past ten or eleven. You ride with old Tucker to the Crooked-post, and come back with him, when he is loaded up. It shan't cost you a farthing. I have got a shilling left, and he shall have it. It is only two miles, or so, from Crooked-post to this end of Blackmarsh; and there you will find me waiting. Come, you can't get out of that."
"But what do you want me there for, sir? Of course, I'd go anywhere you would venture, if I could see any good in it."
"Sergeant, I'll tell you what. You thought a great deal of Sir Thomas Waldron, didn't you?"
"More than of any man that ever lived, or ever will see the light of this wicked world."
"And you didn't like what was done to him, did you?"
"Master Hopper, I tell you what. I'd give ten years off my poor life, if I could find out who did it."
"Then I fancy I have found out something about it. Not much, mind; but still something, and may come to more if we follow it up. And if you come to-morrow, I'll show you what it is. You know that my eyes are pretty sharp, and that I wasn't born yesterday. You know who it was that found 'Little Billy.' And you know who wants to get Fox out of this scrape, because he is a Somerset man, and all that, and doesn't deserve this trouble. And still more, because——"
"Well, Master Hopper, still more, because of what?"
"I don't mind telling you something, Sergeant—you have seen a lot of the world, you know. Because Jemmy Fox has got a deuced pretty sister."