former cheery friend.

Those two were not the only warnings James Moore received. During
the weeks immediately preceding the Trials, the danger signal was
perpetually flaunted beneath his nose.

Twice did Watch, the black cross-bred chained in the straw-yard, hurl a
brazen challenge on the night air. Twice did the Master, with lantern,
Sam'l and Owd Bob, sally forth and search every hole and corner on the
premises--to find nothing. One of the dairy-maids gave notice, avowing
that the farm was haunted; that, on several occasions in the early
morning, she had seen a bogie flitting down the slope to the Wastrel--a
sure portent, Sam'l declared, of an approaching death in the house.
While once a shearer, coming up from the village, reported having seen,
in the twilight of dawn, a little ghostly figure, haggard and startled,
stealing silently from tree to tree in the larch-copse by the lane. The
Master, however, irritated by these constant alarms, dismissed the story
summarily.

"One thing I'm sartin o'," said he. "There's not a critter moves on
Kenmuir at nights but Th' Owd Un knows it."

Yet, even as he said it, a little man, draggled, weary-eyed, smeared
with dew and dust, was limping in at the door of a house barely a mile
away. "Nae luck, Wullie, curse it!" he cried, throwing himself into a
chair, and addressing some one who was not there--"nae luck. An' yet I'm
sure o't as I am that there's a God in heaven."

* * * * *

M'Adam had become an old man of late. But little more than fifty, yet he
looked to have reached man's allotted years. His sparse hair was quite
white; his body shrunk and bowed; and his thin hand shook like an aspen
as it groped to the familiar bottle.

In another matter, too, he was altogether changed. Formerly, whatever
his faults, there had been no harder-working man in the country-side.
At all hours, in all weathers, you might have seen him with his gigantic
attendant going his rounds. Now all that was different: he never put his
hand to the plough, and with none to help him the land was left wholly
untended; so that men said that, of a surety, there would be a farm to
let on the March Mere Estate come Michaelmas.

Instead of working, the little man sat all day in the kitchen at home,
brooding over his wrongs, and brewing vengeance. Even the Sylvester
Arms knew him no more; for he stayed where he was with his dog and his
bottle. Only, when the shroud of night h