der his sackcloth-coloured beard. His cap was sackcloth
too, with a flap behind, to keep twigs and bark out of his neck. He
navigated the tug among pools of heather-water that splashed in their
faces, and through clumps of young birches that slashed at their legs,
and when they hit an old toadstooled stump, they never knew whether it
would give way in showers of rotten wood, or jar them back again.

At the top of Rabbit Shaw half-a-dozen men and a team of horses stood
round a forty-foot oak log in a muddy hollow. The ground about was
poached and stoached with sliding hoofmarks, and a wave of dirt was
driven up in front of the butt.

'What did you want to bury her for this way?' said Cattiwow. He took his
broad-axe and went up the log tapping it.

'She's sticked fast,' said 'Bunny' Lewknor, who managed the other team.

Cattiwow unfastened the five wise horses from the tug. They cocked their
ears forward, looked, and shook themselves.

'I believe Sailor knows,' Dan whispered to Una.

'He do,' said a man behind them. He was dressed in flour sacks like the
others, and he leaned on his broad-axe, but the children, who knew all
the wood-gangs, knew he was a stranger. In his size and oily hairiness
he might have been Bunny Lewknor's brother, except that his brown eyes
were as soft as a spaniel's, and his rounded black beard, beginning
close up under them, reminded Una of the walrus in 'The Walrus and the
Carpenter.'

'Don't he justabout know?' he said shyly, and shifted from one foot to
the other.

'Yes. "What Cattiwow can't get out of the woods must have roots growing
to her."' Dan had heard old Hobden say this a few days before.

At that minute Puck pranced up, picking his way through the pools of
black water in the ling.

'Look out!' cried Una, jumping forward. 'He'll see you, Puck!'

'Me and Mus' Robin are pretty middlin' well acquainted,' the man
answered with a smile that made them forget all about walruses.

'This is Simon Cheyneys,' Puck began, and cleared his throat.
'Shipbuilder of Rye Port; burgess of the said town, and the only--'

'Oh, look! Look ye! That's a knowing one,' said the man.

Cattiwow had fastened his team to the thin end of the log, and was
moving them about with his whip till they stood at right angles to it,
heading downhill. Then he grunted. The horses took the strain, beginning
with Sailor next the log, like a tug-of-war team, and dropped almost to
their knees. The log shifted a na