“An’ he does,” said the dalesman, his eyes aflame, “I’ll toitle him into the beck till he’s as wankle as a wet sack.”

He was not so old but that he could have kept his word.  His great frame seemed closer knit at sixty than it had been at thirty.  His face, with its long, square, gray beard, looked severer than ever under his cloth hood.  Wilson returned no more, and the promise of a drenching was never fulfilled.

The ungainly little Scot did not leave the Wythburn district.  He pitched his tent with the village tailor in a little house at Fornside, close by the Moss.  The tailor himself, Simeon Stagg, was kept pitiably poor in that country, when one sack coat of homespun cloth lasted a shepherd half a lifetime.  He would have lived a solitary as well as a miserable life but for his daughter Rotha, a girl of nineteen, who kept his little home together and shared his poverty when she might have enjoyed the comforts of easier homes elsewhere.

“Your father is nothing but an ache and a stound to you, lass,” Sim would say in a whimper.  “It’ll be well for you, Rotha, when you give me my last top-sark and take me to the kirkyard yonder,” the little man would snuffle audibly.

“Hush, father,” the girl would say, putting the palm of her hand playfully over his mouth, “you’ll be sonsie-looking yet.”

Sim was heavily in debt, and this preyed on his mind.  He had always been a grewsome body, sustaining none of the traditions of his craft for perky gossip.  Hence he was no favorite in Wythburn, where few or none visited him.  Latterly Sim’s troubles seemed to drive him from his home for long walks in the night.  While the daylight lasted his work gave occupation to his mind, but when the darkness came on he had no escape from haunting thoughts, and roamed about the lanes in an effort to banish them.  It was to this man’s home that Wilson turned when he was shut out of Shoulthwaite Moss.  Naturally enough, the sinister Scot was a welcome if not an agreeable guest when he came as lodger, with money to pay, where poverty itself seemed host.

Old Wilson had not chosen the tailor’s house as his home on account of any comforts it might be expected to afford him.  He had his own reasons for not quitting Wythburn after he had received his very unequivocal “sneck posset.”  “Better a wee bush,” he would say, “than na bield”.  Shelter certainly the tailor’s home afforded him; and that was all that he required for the present.  Wilson had not been long in the tailor’s cottage before Sim seemed to grow uneasy under a fresh anxiety, of which his lodger was the subject.  Wilson’s manners had obviously undergone a change.  His early smoothness, his slavering glibness, had disappeared.  He was now as bitter of speech as he had formerly been conciliatory.  With Sim and his troubles, real and imaginary, he was not at all careful to exhibit sympathy.  “Weel, weel, ye must lie heids and thraws wi’ poverty, like Jock an’ his mither”; or, “If ye canna keep geese ye mun keep gezlins.”