“Mr. Benshaw,” said the voice from the shadows, “’E’s arter ’im now with a shot gun loaded up wi’ oats. ’E’ll pepper ’im if ’e gets ’im, Bill will, you bet your ’at. And serve ’im jolly well right _tew_.” “I doubt,” said the baker, “I doubt if I’ll ever get my stummik—not thoroughly proper again. It’s a Blow I’ve ’ad. ’E give me a Blow. Oh! Mr. ’Orrocks, _could_ I trouble you for another thimbleful of brandy? Just a thimbleful neat. It eases the ache....” CHAPTER VI BEALBY AND THE TRAMP § 1 Bealby was loth to leave the caravan party even when by his own gross negligence it had ceased to be a caravan party. He made off regretfully along the crest of the hills through bushes of yew and box until the clamour of the disaster was no longer in his ears. Then he halted for a time and stood sorrowing and listening and then turned up by a fence along the border of a plantation and so came into a little overhung road. His ideas of his immediate future were vague in the extreme. He was a receptive expectation. Since his departure from the gardener’s cottage circumstances had handed him on. They had been interesting but unstable circumstances. He supposed they would still hand him on. So far as he had any definite view about his intentions it was that he was running away to sea. And that he was getting hungry. It was also, he presently discovered, getting dark very gently and steadily. And the overhung road after some tortuosities expired suddenly upon the bosom of a great grey empty common with distant mysterious hedges. It seemed high time to Bealby that something happened of a comforting nature. Always hitherto something or someone had come to his help when the world grew dark and cold, and given him supper and put him or sent him to bed. Even when he had passed a night in the interstices of Shonts he had known there was a bed at quite a little distance under the stairs. If only that loud Voice hadn’t shouted curses whenever he moved he would have gone to it. But as he went across this common in the gloaming it became apparent that this amiable routine was to be broken. For the first time he realized the world could be a homeless world. And it had become very still. Disagreeably still, and full of ambiguous shadows. That common was not only an unsheltered place, he felt, but an unfriendly place, and he hurried to a gate at the further end. He kept glancing to the right and to the left. It would be pleasanter when he had got through that gate and shut it after him. In England there are no grey wolves. Yet at times one thinks of wolves, grey wolves, the colour of twilight and running noiselessly, almost noiselessly, at the side of their prey for quite a long time before they close in on it. In England, I say, there are no grey wolves.