Besides, Miss Boyce had, after all, much part in this double life of his.  Whenever he was at home, sitting over the fire with a pipe, he read those papers and things she had brought him in the summer.  He had not taken much notice of them at first.  Now he spelled them out again and again.  He had always thought “them rich people took advantage of yer.”  But he had never supposed, somehow, they were such thieves, such mean thieves, as it appeared, they were.  A curious ferment filled his restless, inconsequent brain.  The poor were downtrodden, but they were coming to their rights.  The land and its creatures were for the people! not for the idle rich.  Above all, Westall was a devil, and must be put down.  For the rest, if he could have given words to experience, he would have said that since he began to go out poaching he had burst his prison and found himself.  A life which was not merely endurance pulsed in him.  The scent of the night woods, the keenness of the night air, the tracks and ways of the wild creatures, the wiles by which he slew them, the talents and charms of his dog Bruno—­these things had developed in him new aptitudes both of mind and body, which were in themselves exhilaration.  He carried his dwarf’s frame more erect, breathed from an ampler chest.  As for his work at the Court, he thought of it often with impatience and disgust.  It was a more useful blind than his cobbling, or he would have shammed illness and got quit of it.

“Them were sharp uns that managed that business at Tudley End!” He fell thinking about it and chuckling over it as he smoked.  Two of Westall’s best coverts swept almost clear just before the big shoot in November!—­and all done so quick and quiet, before you could say “Jack Robinson.”  Well, there was plenty more yet, more woods, and more birds.  There were those coverts down there, on the Mellor side of the hollow—­they had been kept for the last shoot in January.  Hang him! why wasn’t that fellow up to time?

But no one came, and he must sit on, shivering and smoking, a sack across his shoulders.  As the stir of nerve and blood caused by the ferreting subsided, his spirits began to sink.  Mists of Celtic melancholy, perhaps of Celtic superstition, gained upon him.  He found himself glancing from side to side, troubled by the noises in the wood.  A sad light wind crept about the trunks like a whisper; the owls called overhead; sometimes there was a sudden sharp rustle or fall of a branch that startled him.  Yet he knew every track, every tree in that wood.  Up and down that field outside he had followed his father at the plough, a little sickly object of a lad, yet seldom unhappy, so long as childhood lasted, and his mother’s temper could be fled from, either at school or in the fields.  Under that boundary hedge to the right he had lain stunned and bleeding all a summer afternoon, after old Westall had thrashed him, his heart scorched within him by the sense of wrong and the craving for revenge.  On that dim path leading down the slope of the wood, George Westall had once knocked him down for disturbing a sitting pheasant.  He could see himself falling—­the tall, powerful lad standing over him with a grin.