with something approaching
satisfaction.

And as he walked slowly back, blinking in the unaccustomed daylight,
towards that dignified retirement in which the higher officials at
Charing Cross shelter from the importunity of the vulgar, he smiled
still at his unaccustomed energy. It was a very gratifying revelation of
his own possibilities, in spite of the stiffness of his arm. He wished
some of those confounded arm-chair critics of railway management could
have seen it.

IV.

By five o'clock that evening this amazing Cossar, with no appearance of
hurry at all, had got all the stuff for his fight with insurgent Bigness
out of Urshot and on the road to Hickleybrow. Two barrels of paraffin
and a load of dry brushwood he had bought in Urshot; plentiful sacks of
sulphur, eight big game guns and ammunition, three light breechloaders,
with small-shot ammunition for the wasps, a hatchet, two billhooks, a
pick and three spades, two coils of rope, some bottled beer, soda and
whisky, one gross of packets of rat poison, and cold provisions for
three days, had come down from London. All these things he had sent on
in a coal trolley and a hay waggon in the most business-like way, except
the guns and ammunition, which were stuck under the seat of the Red Lion
waggonette appointed to bring on Redwood and the five picked men who had
come up from Ealing at Cossar's summons.

Cossar conducted all these transactions with an invincible air of
commonplace, in spite of the fact that Urshot was in a panic about the
rats, and all the drivers had to be specially paid. All the shops were
shut in the place, and scarcely a soul abroad in the street, and when he
banged at a door a window was apt to open. He seemed to consider that
the conduct of business from open windows was an entirely legitimate and
obvious method. Finally he and Bensington got the Red Lion dog-cart and
set off with the waggonette, to overtake the baggage. They did this a
little beyond the cross-roads, and so reached Hickleybrow first.

Bensington, with a gun between his knees, sitting beside Cossar in the
dog-cart, developed a long germinated amazement. All they were doing
was, no doubt, as Cossar insisted, quite the obvious thing to do,
only--! In England one so rarely does the obvious thing. He glanced from
his neighbour's feet to the boldly sketched hands upon the reins. Cossar
had apparently never driven before, and he was keeping the line of least
resistance down t