“What am I to do, Jim, an’ them chillen—­when you’re took to prison?” she asked him vehemently.

“I shan’t get took to prison, I tell yer.  All the same, Westall got holt o’ me this mornin’.  I thought praps you’d better know.”

Her exclamation of terror, her wild look at him, were exactly what he had expected; nevertheless, he flinched before them.  His brutality was mostly assumed.  He had adopted it as a mask for more than a year past, because he must go his way, and she worried him.

“Now look here,” he said resolutely, “it don’t matter.  I’m not goin’ to be took by Westall.  I’d kill him or myself first.  But he caught me lookin’ at a snare this mornin’—­it wor misty, and I didn’t see no one comin’.  It wor close to the footpath, and it worn’t my snare.”

“‘Jim, my chap,’ says he, mockin’, ’I’m sorry for it, but I’m going to search yer, so take it quietly,’ says he.  He had young Dynes with him—­so I didn’t say nought—­I kep’ as still as a mouse, an’ sure enough he put his ugly han’s into all my pockets.  An’ what do yer think he foun’?”

“What?” she said breathlessly.

“Nothink!” he laughed out.  “Nary an end o’ string, nor a kink o’ wire—­nothink.  I’d hidden the two rabbits I got las’ night, and all my bits o’ things in a ditch far enough out o’ his way.  I just laughed at the look ov ’im.  ‘I’ll have the law on yer for assault an’ battery, yer damned miscalculatin’ brute!’ says I to him—­’why don’t yer get that boy there to teach yer your business?’ An’ off I walked.  Don’t you be afeared—­’ee’ll never lay hands on me!”

But Minta was sore afraid, and went on talking and lamenting while she made the tea.  He took little heed of her.  He sat by the fire quivering and thinking.  In a public-house two nights before this one, overtures had been made to him on behalf of a well-known gang of poachers with head-quarters in a neighbouring county town, who had their eyes on the pheasant preserves in Westall’s particular beat—­the Tudley End beat—­and wanted a local watcher and accomplice.  He had thought the matter at first too dangerous to touch.  Moreover, he was at that moment in a period of transition, pestered by Minta to give up “the poachin’,” and yet drawn back to it after his spring and summer of field work by instincts only recently revived, after long dormancy, but now hard to resist.

Presently he turned with anger upon one of Minta’s wails which happened to reach him.

“Look ‘ere!” said he to her, “where ud you an’ the chillen be this night if I ’adn’t done it?  ‘Adn’t we got rid of every stick o’ stuff we iver ’ad?  ’Ere’s a well-furnished place for a chap to sit in!”—­he glanced bitterly round the bare kitchen, which had none of the little properties of the country poor, no chest, no set of mahogany drawers, no comfortable chair, nothing, but the dresser and the few rush chairs and the table, and a few odds and ends of crockery and household stuff—­“wouldn’t we all a bin on the parish, if we ’adn’t starved fust—­wouldn’t we?—­jes’ answer me that! Didn’t we sit here an’ starve, till the bones was comin’ through the chillen’s skin?—­didn’t we?”