Steer shook his head. The cautious man was making sure of his surroundings before he opened fire. Old Mrs. Bowden sat in her chair by the hearth with her little old back turned to the room. Bowden’s white-headed bobtail was stretched out with his chin on his paws; a yellow cat crouched, still as the Sphinx, with half-closed eyes; nothing else was alive, except the slow-ticking clock. Steer held up the amethyst ring. “See this?” Undisturbed by meaning or emotion, Bowden’s face was turned slowly towards the ring. “Ah! What about it?” “’Twas given to my niece for a purpose. Is that purpose goin’ to be fulfilled?” “Tidden for me to say. Ask Ned.” Steer closed his hand, slightly covered with reddish hairs. “I’ve heard tales,” he said. “And if he don’ mean to keep his word I’ll have the law of him. I’ve always thought my niece a sight too good for him; but if he thinks he can put a slight on her he’s reckonin’ without the cost--that’s all.” Bowden blew out a cloud of smoke. “Ned’s a man grown.” “Do you abet him?” Bowden turned his head lazily. “Don’t you come here bullyin’ me.” And again he puffed out a cloud of smoke. Its scent increased the resentment in Steer, who was no smoker. “Like father, like son,” he said. “We know what _your_ father was like.” Bowden took his pipe from his mouth with a fist the size of a beefsteak. “With the old lady settin’ there! Get out o’ my house!” A wave of exasperated blood flooded Steer’s thin cheeks. “You know right well that she hears naught.” Bowden replaced his pipe. “’Tes no yuse tachin’ yu manners,” he muttered. Something twitched in Steer’s lean throat, where the reddish-grey hair covered his Adam’s apple. “I’ll give your son a week; and then look out.” A chuckle pursued him to the door. ‘All right!’ he thought, ‘we’ll see who’ll laugh last.’ IV Difficult to say whether morality exists in a man like Bowden, whose blood is racy of the soil, and whose farmyard is so adjacent. That his son should run riot with the girl Pansy would have struck him more, perhaps, if Steer had not shot his dog--the affair so providentially put that fellow’s nose out of joint. It went far, in fact, to assuage his outraged sense of property, and to dull the feeling that he had betrayed his dog by not actively opposing village justice. As for the ‘Law,’ the Bowdens had lived for too many generations in a parish where no constable was resident to have any real belief in its powers. He often broke the law himself in a quiet way--shooting stray pheasants and calling them pigeons; not inspecting his rabbit traps morning and evening; not keeping quite to date in dipping his sheep, and so forth. The ‘Law’ could always be evaded. Besides, what law was Ned breaking? That was Steer’s gup!