his stupidity
in not thinking of it at first. Once again he racked his brains to
remember where he had seen the man before, for certainly he had seen
him or some one very like him; and with his mind full of Mrs. Mugford
he suddenly recalled her son Henry, who had enlisted for a marine, and
had once come back on sick-leave. The more he thought of it, the more
certain he was that the man whom he had found was Henry Mugford, for
though he had not seen him for some years he had never heard that he
had been discharged. That would account for Mrs. Mugford's anxiety to
keep the Corporal out of the village, and to get the idiot arrested,
for it would probably be some days before a serjeant of Marines could
arrive from Plymouth, or the idiot himself could be sent there, to
decide if he were the deserter Henry Bale or not. And, as to the name,
the Corporal knew well enough by experience that men constantly
enlisted under assumed names, while Bale was a likely name for this
particular man to choose, as it had been Mrs. Mugford's own before she
married.

Thus reflecting, the Corporal turned along the path that led through
the woods lying above the village, stopped when he saw the roofs of the
cottages below him, and went down through the covert towards the hedge
that parted the cottage-gardens from it. It was dusk, so that he had
little difficulty in remaining unseen, and as he drew nearer to the two
cottages where Mrs. Fry and Mrs. Mugford lived, he heard the voices of
the pair in violent altercation in the garden below.

"You said so plain as could be that you'd a-share the two guineas with
me," Mrs. Fry was saying indignantly. "That's what you said."

"And don't I say that I'll give 'ee five shillings?" retorted Mrs.
Mugford, "and that's more than nine out of ten would give. 'Twas I
catched mun and not you. If I hadn't stopped mun in the road they'd
never have catched mun at all, and 'twas a chance then that he might
have killed me, mazed as he is. And you've a-taken pounds and pounds
from the gentry for the harm that was done your Tommy, and never given
me so much as a penny, though I've a-showed mun many times when you
wasn't in house."

"Well," said Mrs. Fry defiantly, "then we'll see what people say when I
tells what I've a-seen of a man coming round to your house night-times
these weeks and weeks, and you going out to mun with bread and mate.
I've a-seen mun, for all that you was so false."

Then they droppe