With a sense of escape from actual danger, whether physical or moral he did not stay to enquire, he stumbled, a few minutes later, through a gap in the earth-bank into the wet side lane.  Arrived, he gave himself a moment’s breathing space.  It was darker here than out upon the warren; but, anyhow, this was a lane.  It had direction and meaning.  Men had constructed it for the linking up of house with house, hamlet with hamlet.  Like all roads, it represented the initial instinct of communal life, the basis of a reasoned social order, of civilization in short.  He walked forward over the soft couch of fallen, water-soaked leaves, his boots squelching at times into inches of sucking mud, and his spirits rose.  He began to enter into normal relations both with himself and with things in general.  A hundred yards or so and the village green would be reached.

Then on his left, behind an ill-kept quick-set hedge that guarded a strip of garden and orchard, he became aware of movement.  Among the apple trees three small figures shuffled about some dark recumbent object.  For the most part they went on all fours, but at moments reared up on their hind legs.  Their action was at once silent, stealthy and purposeful.  Our young clergyman’s shortness of sight rendered their appearance the more peculiar.  His normal attitude was not so completely restored, moreover, but that they caused him another nervous tremor.  Then he grasped the truth; while the detective, latent in every moralist, sprang to attention.  Here were criminals to be brought to justice, criminals caught red-handed.  Reginald Sawyer, having been rather badly scared himself, lusted—­though honestly ignorant of any personal touch in the matter—­to very badly scare others.

Standing back beside the half-open gate, screened by the hedge, here high and straggling, he awaited the psychological moment, ready to pounce.  To enter the orchard and confront these sinners with their crime, if their activities did by chance happen to be legitimate, was to put himself altogether in the wrong.  He would bide his time, would let them conclude their—­in his belief—­nefarious business and challenge them as they passed out.

Nor had he long to wait.  The two smaller boys, breathing hard, hoisted the bulging, half-filled sack on to the back of their bigger companion; who, bowed beneath its weight, grunting with exertion, advanced towards the exit.

Sawyer laid aside his walking-stick, and, as the leader of the procession came abreast of him, pounced.  But missed his aim.  Upon which the boy cast down the sack, from the mouth of which apples, beets, turnips rolled into the road; and, with a yelp, bolted down the lane towards the causeway, leaving his accomplices to their fate.  These, thrown into confusion by the suddenness of his desertion, hesitated and were lost.  For, pouncing again, and that the more warily for his recent failure, Sawyer collared one with either hand.