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Bowden blew out a cloud of smoke.

“Ned’s a man grown.”

“Do you abet him?”

Bowden turned his head lazily.

“Don’t you come here bullyin’ me.” And again he puffed out a cloud of smoke. Its scent increased the resentment in Steer, who was no smoker.

“Like father, like son,” he said. “We know what your father was like.”

Bowden took his pipe from his mouth with a fist the size of a beefsteak.

“With the old lady settin’ there! Get out o’ my house!”

A wave of exasperated blood flooded Steer’s thin cheeks.

“You know right well that she hears naught.”

Bowden replaced his pipe. “’Tes no yuse tachin’ yu manners,” he muttered.

Something twitched in Steer’s lean throat, where the reddish-grey hair covered his Adam’s apple.

“I’ll give your son a week; and then look out.”

A chuckle pursued him to the door.

‘All right!’ he thought, ‘we’ll see who’ll laugh last.’

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Difficult to say whether morality exists in a man like Bowden, whose blood is racy of the soil, and whose farmyard is so adjacent. That his son should run riot with the girl Pansy would have struck him more, perhaps, if Steer had not shot his dog—the affair so providentially put that fellow’s nose out of joint. It went far, in fact, to assuage his outraged sense of property, and to dull the feeling that he had betrayed his dog by not actively opposing village justice. As for the ‘Law,’ the Bowdens had lived for too many generations in a parish where no constable was resident to have any real belief in its powers. He often broke the law himself in a quiet way—shooting stray pheasants and calling them pigeons; not inspecting his rabbit traps morning and evening; not keeping quite to date in dipping his sheep, and so forth. The ‘Law’ could always be evaded. Besides, what law was Ned breaking? That was Steer’s gup!