She took Mary and the children upstairs. Abner stayed on in the long room alone, listening to the busy clatter of the house. The landlord, his sons, and a couple of village girls, who had been brought in to deal with the rush of business, went running up and down stairs and stone passages and in and out of the bar as quickly and apparently as aimlessly as the inhabitants of a disturbed ants’ nest. The sun dipped behind the mountains. A train arrived from the north, then another from the south, and each time the street was flooded with a crowd of excitable men knocking at door after door in search of lodging for the night. Abner heard the landlord in the bar refusing them one after another. With the second train arrived the important Mr Prowse, a tall, lumbering man in cord breeches and black leggings covered with the red dust of the Black Mountain, from the slopes of which he came. He wore a close red beard, and spoke in a high sing-song, for part of his mountain pasturage was in Wales. He had already drunk too freely at the Craven Arms station buffet to be much worried by the idea of a sleeping companion. ‘What is it you’re after this fair, Mr Prowse?’ asked the landlord. ‘Draught horses,’ said the farmer. ‘They’re very scarce down our way, and a price that would frighten you.’ ‘Then you and me are going to have a field day, Mr Prowse,’ said a fat, asthmatical Cardiff Jew, who had just arrived in the doorway. ‘Ah, Mr Myers, how is it then?’ said the farmer. ‘Mr May says he’s put you and me to sleep in the same room. There’s a young woman in the front.’ ‘A young woman?’ growled Myers. ‘What’s a young woman doing here at this time?’ ‘The more of them the better!’ said the farmer, with a laugh. ‘No. . . . I’ve got over all that,’ said the Jew, shaking his head. ‘Now, what are you two gentlemen taking with me?’ asked the landlord. They all settled down to talk about horses. Abner was getting more and more hungry and wondering when Mary would come downstairs. The sight of that magnificent array of food whetted his appetite, but he did not want to be the first to begin. He drew himself a mug of cider from the cask: a dry, half bitter product of the Hereford orchards. He drank a pint of it, and the alcohol, taken on an empty stomach, made him happy and confident. He no longer felt uneasy that Mary was so long away.