“’Tis Veale, sir.  A’bram Veale, sir.  Theer!” And all the cries came loud and hearty.  “Theer he goes ag’in.  I see ’un come up and go under.  Oo, oo!  Ain’t ’un trav’lin’!”

“Catch th’ ’orse!” shouted Dale; and next moment it was a double entertainment that offered itself to hurrying spectators.

The water, charged with sediment from all the rich earth it had scoured over, was thick as soup; its brown wavelets broke in slimy froth, and its deepest swiftest course had a color of darkly shining lead beneath the pale gleams of March sunshine.  In this leaden glitter the two men were swept away, seeming to be locked in each other’s arms, their heads very rarely out of the water, their backs visible frequently; until at a boundary fence they vanished from the sight of attentive pursuers who could pursue no further; and seemed in the final glimpse as small and black as two otters fiercely fighting.

“Laard’s sake,” said one of the louts, “I’d ‘a’ liked to ‘a’ seen ’em go over the weir and into the wheel—­for ’tis to be, and there’s nought can stop it now.”

The event, however, proved otherwise.  Before the submerged weir was reached a kindly branch among the willows, stretching gnarled hands just above the flood level, gave the ready aid that no louts could offer.  Here Dale contrived to hang until people came from the mill and fished him and his now unconscious burden out of their hazardous predicament.

This little incident so stimulated Dale’s servants that they began to work for him quite enthusiastically.  It occurred to them that he was not only a good plucked ’un, but that, however hard his manner, his heart must possess a big soft spot in it, or he could never have so “put himself about for a rammucky pot-swilling feller like Abe Veale.”

Veale was truly a feckless, good-for-little creature.  By trade a hurdle-maker, he lived in one of the few remaining mud cottages on the skirts of Hadleigh Upper Wood, and in his hovel he had bred an immense family.  His wife had long since died; her mother, a toothless old crone, kept house for him and was supposed to look after the younger children; but generally the Veales and their domestic arrangements were considered as a survival of a barbaric state of society and a disgrace in these highly polished modern times.  People said that Veale was half a gipsy, that his boys were growing up as hardy young poachers, and that every time he got drunk at the Barradine Arms he would himself produce wire nooses from his pocket, and offer to go out and snare a pheasant before the morning if anybody would pay for it in advance by another quart of ale.

Drunk or sober now, he widely advertised a sincere sense of obligation to his preserver.  He bothered Dale with too profuse acknowledgments; he came to the Vine-Pits kitchen door at all hours; and he would even stop the red-coated young gentlemen as they rode home from hunting, in order to supply them with unimpeachable details of all that had happened.  He told the tale with the greatest gusto, and invariably began and ended in the same manner.