grin. Someone had decorated the bird during
the night with a thin collar of white linen. "Very curious," explained
Macklin; "I got a 'nonamous letter last night, pushed under my door, and
tellin' me there was a scandalous ring-necked bird roosting hereabouts.
The fellow went on to say he wouldn't have troubled me but for knowing the
Squire to be so particular set against this breed, and wound up by signing
himself 'Yours truly, A WELL WISHER.'"

The worse of it was that Macklin found the joke too good to keep it to
himself: by this time the whole countryside knew of Jim's visit to the
"tackydermatist," and maddening allusions to it had kept Jim's temper raw
and his fists pretty active.

So it was that, on the misty afternoon when young Mr. Walter a Cleeve
passed him unawares, Jim had been standing for twenty minutes flat against
a tree on the upper outskirts of the plantation, sunk in a brown study.
The apparition startled him, for the thick air deadened the sound of
footsteps; and the sound, when it fell on his ears, held something
unfamiliar. (Jim was unacquainted with sabots.) He stood perfectly
still, let it go by, and at once prepared to follow--not that his
suspicions connected this stranger with Charley Hannaford, who habitually
worked alone, but because the man's gait ("He lopped like a hare," said
Jim afterwards) and peculiar slouch of the shoulders somehow aroused his
misgivings. Who could this be? And what might be his business that he
followed no path, yet seemed to be walking with a purpose?

A shallow ditch ran along the inner side of the fence, clear of
undergrowth and half filled with rotted leaves. Along this Jim followed,
gun in hand, keeping his quarry's head-and shoulders well in sight over
the coping. This was laborious work, for he plunged ankle-deep at every
step; but the leaves, sodden with a week's rain, made a noiseless carpet,
whereas the brushwood might have crackled and betrayed him.

Walter a Cleeve limped forward, not once turning his head. These were his
paternal acres, and he knew every inch of them, almost every spot of
lichen along the fence. Abroad he had dreamed of them, night after night;
but he did not pause to regreet them now, for his thoughts were busy
ahead, in the Court now directly beneath him in the valley; and in his
thoughts he was there already, announcing himself, facing his mother in
her unchanged room, and his father in the library.

Amid these thoughts