Now a hungry fellow paused to gather a bunch of the good-tasting grass and was butted out of the path, and now some curly-shouldered belligerent roared his defiant bellow and it went rumbling through the hills. We drove the cattle through the open gate of the pasture and down a long lane to the scales.
Nicholas Marsh seemed another man, and I felt the first touch of triumph come with the crisp morning. Woodford was losing. We had the cattle and there remained only to drive them in. It is a wonderful thing how the frost glistening on a rail, or a redbird chirping in a thicket of purple raspberry briers, can lift the heart into the sun. Marks and his crew were creatures of a nightmare, gone in the daylight, hung up in the dark hollow of some oak tree with the bat.
Marsh and the drivers went ahead of the cattle to the scales, and I followed the drove, stopping to close the gate and fasten it with its wooden pin to the old chestnut gate-post. High up on this gate-post was a worn hole about as big as a walnut, door to the mansion of some speckled woodpecker. As I whistled merrily under his sill, the master of this house stepped up to his threshold and leered down at me.
He looked old and immoral, with a mosaic past, the sort of woodpecker who, if born into a higher estate, would have guzzled rum and gambled with sailors. His head was bare in spots, his neck frowsy, and his eyelids scaly. "Young sir," this debauched old Worldly Wiseman seemed to say, "you think you're a devil of a fellow merely because it happens to be morning. Gad sooks! You must be very young. When you get a trifle further on with the mischief of living, you will realise that a bucketful of sunlight doesn't run the devil out of business. Damme, sirrah! Please to clear out with your accursed whistling."
I left him to cool his head in the morning breezes.
Nicholas Marsh was waiting for me at the scales when I arrived. He wished me to see that they were balanced properly. He adjusted the beam, adding a handful of shot or a nail or an iron washer to the weights. Then we put on the fifty-pound test, and then a horse. When we were satisfied that the scales were in working order, we weighed the cattle four at a time. I took down the weights as Marsh called them, and when we had finished, the drove was turned into the road toward the river.