“The gate was open when I passed through,” he remarked. “And if it’s closed now it’ll be difficult to find it again. The country is so level here, and all the fields are so much alike. I recollect at the time looking around for some landmark and finding nothing until I got to the top end of the field, over the brow of the hill.”
“We’ll go on slowly,” I said. “You’ll recognise it presently.”
We passed half a dozen fields with rough cart-roads running through each of them. Indeed, after harvest each field generally bears marks of carts in its gateway. In the darkness my companion had not been able to see what had been grown, except that the crop had been cut and carried.
For another couple of miles we rode forward, the doctor examining every field but failing to recognise the gateway into which he had turned, until at length we came to the junction of the road from Weldon, when he pulled up, saying—
“I didn’t come as far as this. We’d better turn back.”
This we did, slowly retracing our way in the sunset, the doctor now and then expressing disgust at his own failure to recognise the path.
Presently we encountered an old labourer plodding home from work with bag and scythe across his shoulder, and pulling up, the doctor asked, pointing over the hill—
“Which is the way to the farm across there?”
“What farm?” asked the man blankly, in his broad Northamptonshire dialect.
“I don’t know the name, but there’s a road goes in across one of these fields.”