that break in the ice, away there, by the two hanging ash trees. Well, I got him out of there in the middle of the night. I had to lug the ladder along to do it—we’ll have to haul it back again presently, by the way. He’d have been drowned but for it.”

“That he would, sure-ly.” Then the intense rustic suspicion of everything and everybody unknown asserted itself—“What be he a doing there—on the ice—middle of the night? Poachin’ may be?” Mervyn laughed.

“No—no. He’s no poacher whatever he is?”

“And what might he be? Tell me that,” and the old countryman’s little eyes blinked with satisfaction over what he considered his own shrewdness.

“Don’t know, I didn’t ask him and he hasn’t told me—yet. It’s a bad habit to get into—asking people questions about themselves and their private affairs, Joe. It’s a thing I don’t do.”

The ancient slowly shook his head—pityingly, contemptuously. He thought his master little removed from a fool.

“Folks as gets on the ice, middle of Plane Pond—middle of the night, and don’t say nothin’ as to how they gets there and what they be after, bean’t up to no good. That’s what I say, muster.” And the speaker nodded profoundly.

“You’re a rare clever ’un, Joe,” and Mervyn laughed banteringly. “Now there’d be no great difficulty in any one, especially a stranger, losing his way in country like this, and that in the teeth of a howling sleet storm. Taking a short cut, you know, and thinking to cross the ice instead of taking all the way round? That needn’t prove he was up to no good. Eh?”

But to this the old fellow condescended no reply. He didn’t take kindly to banter, slow witted people don’t as a rule. He spat on his palms, picked up the handles of the barrow he had come to fetch and moved off with it. His master followed him, chatting desultorily. Three or four pigs in a stye grunted shrilly as the human clement suggested morning aliment. To this was added the cacklings and flutterings of the occupants of a fowl roost, expectant of like solid advantage.

“Mus’ Reynolds he bin around sure-ly,” chuckled old Joe, looking down on the numerous pad marks of a fox indented in the fresh snow. “Well, well, that there wire cageing’s too tough for his milk teeth. He’ll ha’ gone away wi’ an empty belly I rackon.”

“That reminds me, Joe, that I could peck a bit 

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