A master of craft

by W. W. Jacobs

Flower made no reply. Some slices of fat bacon were sizzling in a pan over the wood-fire, and the pungent smell of the woods, mixed with the sharpness of the morning air, gave him an appetite to which, since his enforced idleness, he had been a stranger. He drew his chair up to the rickety little table with its covering of frayed oil-cloth, and, breaking a couple of eggs over his bacon, set to eagerly.

“Don’t get eggs like these in London,” he said to the old woman.

The old woman leaned over and, inspecting the shells, paid a tribute to the hens who were responsible for them, and traced back a genealogy which would have baffled the entire College of Heralds—a genealogy hotly contested by the old man, who claimed a bar sinister through three eggs bought at the village shop some generations before.

“You’ve got a nice little place here,” said Flower, by way of changing the conversation, which was well on the way to becoming personal; “but don’t you find it rather dull sometimes?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the old woman. “I finds plenty to do, and ’e potters about like. ’E don’t do much, but it pleases ’im, and it don’t hurt me.”

The object of these compliments took them as a matter of course, and after hunting up the stump of last night’s cigar, and shredding it with his knife, crammed it into a clay pipe and smoked tranquilly. Flower found a solitary cigar, one of the Blue Posts’ best, and with a gaze which wandered idly from the chest of drawers on one side of the room to the old china dogs on the little mantel-shelf on the other, smoked in silence.

The old man brought in news at dinner-time. The village was ringing with the news of yesterday’s affair, and a rigourous search, fanned into excitement by an offer of two pounds reward, was taking the place of the more prosaic labours of the country side.

“If it wasn’t for me,” said the old man, in an excess of self-laudation, “you’d be put in the gaol—where you ought to be; but I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t for the five pounds. You’d better keep close in the house. There’s some more of ’em in the wood looking for you.”

Captain Flower took his advice, and for the next two days became a voluntary prisoner. On the third day the old man reported that public excitement about him was dying out, owing partly to the fact that it thought the villain must have made his escape good, and partly to the fact that the landlord of the Wheatsheaf had been sitting at his front door shooting at snakes on the King’s Highway invisible to ordinary folk.

The skipper resolved to make a start on the following evening, walking, the first night so as to get out of the dangerous zone, and then training to London. At the prospect his spirits rose, and in a convivial mood he purchased a bottle of red currant wine from the old woman at supper, and handed it round.