However, Bob earned his money and came along, and Mary saw him and took him in, and let him shake the snow off himself and eat and drink.  Then began the famous blizzard, and I’ve often thought old Bob must have known it was coming.  At any rate there was no choice but to let him stop, for it would have been death to turn him out again.  So he stopped, and when the bad weather was over, he wouldn’t go.  There’s no doubt my sister always liked the man in a way; but women like a man in such a lot of different ways that none could have told exactly how, or why, she set store on him.  For that matter she couldn’t herself.  Indeed I axed her straight out and she tried to explain and failed.  It wasn’t his outer man, for he had a face like a rat, with a great, ragged, grey moustache, thicker on one side than t’other, and eyebrows like anybody else’s whiskers.  And one eyelid was down, though he could see all right with the eye under it.  Round in the back he was and growing bald on the top; but what hair he had was long, and he never would cut it, because he said it kept his neck warm.

He had his history pat, of course, though how much truth there was to it we shall never know in this world.  He was an old soldier, and had been shot in the right foot in India along with Lord Roberts in the Chitral campaign.  Then he’d left the service and messed up his pension—­so he said.  I don’t know how.  Anyway he didn’t get none.  He showed a medal, however, which had been won by him, or somebody else; but it hadn’t got no name on it.  He was a great talker and his manners were far ahead of anything Mary had met with.  He’d think nothing of putting a chair for her, or anything like that; and while he was storm-bound, he earned his keep and more, for he was very handy over a lot of little things, and clever with hosses and so on, and not only would he keep ’em amused of a night with his songs and adventures; but he’d do the accounts, or anything with figures, and he showed my sister how, in a good few ways she was spending money to poor purpose.  He turned out to be a very clean man and very well behaved.  He didn’t make trouble, but was all the other way, and when the snow thawed, he was as busy as a bee helping the men round about the farm.  He made his head save his heels, too, and was full of devices and inventions.

So when I got over after the worst was past, to see how they’d come through it, there was Bob Battle working with the others; and when I looked him up and down and said; “Who be you then?” he explained, and told me how Mary had took him in out of the storm and let him lie in the linhay; and how Noah had given him a suit of old clothes, and how much he was beholden to them all.  And they all had a good word for the man, and Mary fairly simpered, so I thought, when she talked about him.  There was no immediate mention of his going, and when I asked my sister about it, she said: 

“Plenty of time.  No doubt he’ll get about his business in a day or two.”