His mind was still too crowded for sleep. He thought he would have a smoke and began to fill his pipe with the tobacco he had bought earlier in the evening. Again he heard a rustling noise in the hay. When he lit his pipe he would try to see what caused it. He waited, listening, and when next he heard it struck a match and peered in the direction from which it came. ‘Douse that light, mate,’ said a voice, almost at his elbow, ‘and take your bloody feet off my chest. You’ll be afther settin’ the place alight and sending the both of us to hell before our time!’ Abner dropped his match with astonishment. The other, suddenly materialising, put his foot on the glowing fragment. ‘I reckon you give me a bit of a start,’ said Abner, laughing. ‘Start, is it? It’s finished we’ll be if you go throwing match-sticks that way into a heap of tinder.’ The turn of speech amused Abner. ‘It’s easy to see that you don’t know the way to travel, or you wouldn’t be doing the like of that,’ said his unseen companion. ‘I may well be stranded to the world, but it’s not burning I want this night of our lord, I’m tellin’ you.’ He settled down into the hay again, this time at some distance from Abner. Abner had never yet caught a glimpse of him. He could not tell whether he was old or young, pleasant-looking or villainous, but he knew that the stranger was the first person who had accepted him without question since his wanderings began. He no longer felt sleepy and was indeed glad of a chance to talk with another human being. In this at any rate his shadowy companion was ready to oblige him, taking the conversation into his own hands without the least hesitation. He asked Abner where he had come from and how long he had been on the road. ‘God help me!’ he said, ‘you’re not born yet!’ Then he asked Abner if he could spare him a gorm. Abner had not the least idea what a gorm was, but the voice explained that it meant a little weeny dooney bit of tobacco—‘for to chew,’ he explained, ‘we don’t want anny more fireworks. “Anny more for Annimore,” as the guard says.’ Abner gave him his gorm, deciding that the owner of the voice, whatever he looked like, was a cough-drop. They drifted into a discussion of Abner’s adventures during the day. The owner of the voice, who in the course of conversation proclaimed himself to be a certain Mick Connor, usually known as Kerry Mick, had apparently followed much the same track as Abner. He had been refused refreshment at the Barley Mow and taken a dismal pint from the hands of the landlord’s daughter at the second inn, whose nose, he said, would poke a ragman over a double ditch. He listened more seriously to Abner’s account of Tiger’s death. ‘You’re after losin’ a good friend,’ he said, and after a moment of silence in which his jaws could be heard masticating his gorm, embarked on a long story of his own youth. ‘I’ll tell you something quare,’ he said.