“Well, you’ve got a neck,” Giles answered, addressing Walterson, who was almost hysterical with rage. “And I suppose you have some care for it, if he has none!” with a gesture of the thumb in Thistlewood’s direction. “You’d as soon as not, keep your neck unstretched, I suppose?”
“Sooner,” Bess said, flinging a glance of contempt at her lover. “Here, let me teach him,” she continued bluntly; the child had begun to murmur in a low, painful note. “They came on the kid by chance and snatched it, and we’ve put ten miles of water between the place and us.”
“And snow on the ground!” Walterson retorted, pointing to the thin powder that still lay white in the folds of her shawl.
“We came up through the wood,” she answered. “Trust us for that! But that’s not the point. The point is, that your pink-and-white fancy-girl never came. She’d more sense than I thought she had. But you were willing to snatch her, my lad. And why is the risk greater with the child?”
“But——”
“It’s less,” the girl continued, before he could put his objection into words. “It’s less, I tell you, for the child’s more easily tucked away. I’ve a place we can put it, where they’ll not find it if they search for a twelvemonth!”
“They’ll soon search here,” he said sullenly. “There’s not a house they’ll not search if they trace the boat. Nor a bothy on the hills.”
“May be,” she answered confidently. “But when they search you’ll not be here, nor the kid. Nor in a bothy!”
“If you are going to trust Tyson——”
“You leave that to me,” she replied, bending her brows.