s smile, she was telling him quite
familiarly about the ailments of her younger children, the escapades of
her unmarried daughter aged fifteen, the surliness of one of her
sons-in-law, the budding dishonesty of the other, the perils of infant
life, and the need of repainting the big van and getting new pictures
for the front of the booth. Indeed, all the worries of a queen of the
road!

"And I'm so fat!" she said, "and yet I'm not forty, and shan't be for
two year--and me a grandmother!"

"I knowed it!" Jock exclaimed.

"If I wasn't such a heap o' flesh--"

"Ye're the grandest heap o' flesh as I ever set eyes on, and I'm telling
ye!" Jock interrupted her.

VIII

Then there were disconcerting sounds out in the world beyond the van.
The horse stopped. The double doors were forced open from without, and a
black figure, with white eyes in a black face, filled the doorway. The
van had passed through the mining village of Moorthorne, and this was
one of the marauding colliers on the outskirts thereof. When the
colliers had highroad business in the night they did not trouble to wash
their faces after work. The coal-dust was a positive aid to them, for it
gave them a most useful resemblance to the devil.

Jock-at-a-Venture sprang up as though launched from a catapult.

"Is it thou, Jock?" cried the collier, astounded.

"Ay, lad!" said Jock, briefly.

And caught the collier a blow under the chin that sent him flying into
the obscurity of the night. Other voices sounded in the road. Jock
rushed to the doorway, taking a pistol from his pocket. And Mrs Clowes,
all dithering like a jelly, heard shots. The horse started into a
gallop. The reins escaped from the hands of the mistress, but Jock
secured them, and lashed the horse to greater speed with the loose ends
of them.

"I've saved thee, missis!" he said later. "I give him a regular lifter
under the gob, same as I give Jabez, Sunday. But where's the sense of a
lone woman wandering about dark roads of a night wi' a pack of
childer?... Them childer 'ud ha' slept through th' battle o' Trafalgar,"
he added.

Mrs Clowes wept.

"Well may you say it!" she murmured. "And it's not the first time as
I've been set on!"

"Thou'rt nowt but a girl, for all thy flesh and thy grandchilder!" said
Jock. "Dry thy eyes, or I'll dry 'em for thee!"

She smiled in her weeping. It was an invitation to him to carry out his
threat.

And while he was drying her eyes for her, she a