Now "the Moorcock Inn" is a little public house high up above Greenfield on the slope from the road that crosses the hills from Lancashire into Yorkshire, and there resided Bill o' Jack's, innkeeper and gamekeeper, a wizened, crafty, old sinner, whose grey hairs were not venerable, with an evil heart and a foul tongue. More often than not Bill's son, Tom, was to be found at the Inn, when not striding the moors or tippling in the hostelries of Greenfield or Saddleworth. Tom, too, was a gamekeeper, a burly, blustering bully of a fellow, much given to ale and strong waters, and to coarse amours with the light o' loves of the country-side, though he had a wife and children of his own living at Sidebank, near Greenfield. It was given out that the poor neglected woman lived there that her children might be near their work at Greenfield Mill; but I fancy Tom o' Bill's had less worthy reasons for spending most of his nights at the Moorcock. Father and son were Bradburys--sprung of a good yeoman stock, to be sure, but themselves debauched by the calling they had given their lives to, for I have noted as a strange thing, and not easy to be accounted for, that men whose soul's ken is limited to a dog and a gun, and the ways of wild birds, and hares, and rabbits, and the vermin that prey on them weasels, and stoats, and the like, are oft tavern-haunters, and dicers, and brawlers, and blasphemers and sons of Belial in many other ways, of which the less said the better. My blood boiled within me at thought of Miriam clasped in that lecher's arms, his evil eye gloating on her sweet face. "Perhaps 'twas only the drink," I said to soothe her, for she trembled as she spoke of Tom o' Bill's. "It isn't always the drink. He's as bad when he's sober. He wants me to go serve at "the Moorcock," and says he'll load me with jewels, and I shall live like a lady. He must have the cunning of a fox, for often when I've thought for sure I'd given him the go-bye in my journeys across the moor he's sprung from behind a wall or risen sudden from the heather. And I think it's because of me he's so down on Ephraim. He's boasted in his cups that he'll never rest till he has the King's bracelets on Ephraim's wrists and him sent to the Plantations. There's evil blood between them, and I fear me there'll be blood let if things go on"--and she shivered in my arms.