IV—COUNTRY CONFEDERATES
“Let me get this yer all down on paper,” said George Hunt, searching his pockets. “I find if I trust to my memory everything goes clean out of my ’ead. Been like that since I was a boy.”
The man from London with the empty kit bag remarked that George was scarcely an octogenarian.
“I believe in eating roast meat if I can get it,” admitted the lad. “Never been what you London people call a crank. Spite of which, somehow or other, I don’t seem to make what you may call progress, and that’s the truth, Mr. Polsworthy.”
“How do you know that is my name?”
“I don’t,” he admitted. “All I know is that that’s the name you’ve give up at the ‘Unicorn’ where you be staying. Here’s something I can write on. ‘Advice to Intending Emigrants.’ I’ve got no special use for that. Now then, sir, let’s have it all over again.”
“I want you,” said the London man, drawing him away to a sheeted truck, and speaking with great distinctness, “to take a message for me up to the Vicarage.”
“Here’s a question I’ve very often considered to myself,” said George, stopping with the paper flat against the truck. “Is there a ‘k’ in it, or isn’t there a ‘k’ in it, or doesn’t it matter whether you put one or not?”
“And see Miss Thirkell, and tell her—”
“She’s the one with the reddish hair, isn’t she?”