The old man blew on his fingers and moved over to the range, where some heat still lingered. As his custom was, he looked neither of them straight in the face.
“I thought I might come with you as far as Reading, if you were going that far. And if your good lady wife would have my company.”
“If you come with us, you must give any weapons you possess to my husband,” Martha said sharply.
Cocking an eyebrow to see if he surprised them, Pitt drew an old service revolver from his coat pocket.
Deftly, he removed the shells from it and handed it across to Greybeard.
“Since you’re so mad keen on my company, the pair of you,” he said, “I’ll give you some of my knowledge as well as my gun. Before we all settle down to a cosy night’s rest, let’s be smart and drive them sheep in here, out of harm’s way. Don’t you know what a bit of luck you’ve chanced on? Them sheep are worth a fortune apiece. Further down river, at somewhere like Reading, we should be little kings on account of them
– if we don’t get knocked off, of course.”
Greybeard slipped the revolver into his pocket. He looked a long time at the wizened face before him. Pitt gave him a wet-chinned grin of reassurance.
“You get back into bed, sweet,” Greybeard said to Martha. “We’ll get the sheep. I’m sure Jeff has a good idea.”
She could see how much it went against the grain for him to acknowledge the worth of an idea he felt he should have thought of himself. She gave him a closed eye look and went through into the other room as the men left the house. The mutton fat spluttered in the lamp. Wearily, as she lay down again on the improvised bed – it might have been midnight, but she guessed that in an hypothetical world of clocks it would be accounted not yet nine p.m. – the face of Jeff Pitt came before her.
His face had been moulded until it expressed age as much as personality; it had been undermined by the years, until with its wrinkled cheeks and ruined molars it became a common face, closely resembling, say, Towin Thomas’s, and many another countenance that had survived the same storms. These old men, in a time bereft of proper medical and dental care, had taken on a facial resemblance to other forms of life, to wolves, to apes, or to the bark of trees. They seemed, Martha thought, to merge increasingly with the landscape they inhabited.
It was difficult to recall the less raggle-taggle Jeff Pitt she had known when their party first established itself at Sparcot. Perhaps he had been less cocky then, under the fever of events. His teeth had been better, and he wore his army uniform. He had been a gunman then, if an ineffectual one, not a poacher. Since then, how much he had changed!
But perhaps they had all changed in that period. It was eleven years, and the world had been a very different place.