‘They’m all the same, the women,’ he said. ‘Jealous . . . that’s the top and bottom of them. What did you tell her?’ ‘Said I hadn’t seen you at the Pound House.’ ‘God! You didn’t say I’d been to Lesswardine?’ ‘I dain’t know naught about it.’ ‘And the less you know the better, or you’ll be having these women buzz round you like flies. You can tell our Mary what you like, but you’ll need to keep your eyes skinned with mother. I’ve got to bide on the right side of the old woman or it’s all up. She’ll have it out of you before you know you’re there.’ By this time they had reached the lower end of the valley to which the cloggers had lately transferred their work. The whole gang were now housed in the Buffalo and the other scattered cottages of Chapel Green, but a couple of tents were left standing on the banks of the Folly Brook and the smoke of a wood-fire went up blue into the air. ‘I can’t make mother out,’ George grumbled. ‘Here she is with Wigan Joe and the rest of them in the house: a mint of money for the asking, and she goes scaring them over to Mainstone with her long face. If I had the Buffalo I’d soon see they spent their money in the house. It’s as good as robbing me the way she sends them away. She don’t want the money, but I want it bad enough, God knows!’ They parted when they reached the workings. George whistled to Spider, but the dog only wagged her tail and then dived into a trench, preferring to stay with Abner. Munn appeared, rubbing his hands with cold. Abner laughed at him. ‘Put your back into it, Joe, and you’ll soon feel right,’ he said. The day’s work began. A red sun rose sluggishly, half frozen. The light glinted on the long line of swinging picks and the sounds of the work rose cheerily in the thin air. Very different was this from the subdued activity of summer. The labourers did not work only for money but because the exertion sent the blood tingling warm into their hands and feet. Work was an ecstasy and to Abner a greater ecstasy than to the rest of them. He thought of Susie and of the night before. He whistled as he worked for sheer physical joy, rejoicing in his strength, for now once more, after months of soft disuse, his body was finding its right expression and coming splendidly to its own. He stretched his limbs in the sunlight, recapturing the moments of physical exaltation that used to come to him when the Mawne United team stepped out on to the smooth turf of the Albion ground, a company of clean and splendid athletes. And all the time, beneath the pleasant anodyne of work, his body glowed with a rich contentment, knowing that in a few hours night would come and Susie be clinging in his arms again.