urned again as the other set forth, and added
under his breath, looking after him with a leer: 'You wouldn't be let to
go like that, if my Relief warn't as good as come. I'll catch you up in
a mile.'

In a word, his real time of relief being that evening at sunset, his
mate came lounging in, within a quarter of an hour. Not staying to fill
up the utmost margin of his time, but borrowing an hour or so, to be
repaid again when he should relieve his reliever, Riderhood straightway
followed on the track of Bradley Headstone.

He was a better follower than Bradley. It had been the calling of his
life to slink and skulk and dog and waylay, and he knew his calling
well. He effected such a forced march on leaving the Lock House that he
was close up with him--that is to say, as close up with him as he deemed
it convenient to be--before another Lock was passed. His man looked back
pretty often as he went, but got no hint of him. HE knew how to take
advantage of the ground, and where to put the hedge between them, and
where the wall, and when to duck, and when to drop, and had a thousand
arts beyond the doomed Bradley's slow conception.

But, all his arts were brought to a standstill, like himself when
Bradley, turning into a green lane or riding by the river-side--a
solitary spot run wild in nettles, briars, and brambles, and encumbered
with the scathed trunks of a whole hedgerow of felled trees, on the
outskirts of a little wood--began stepping on these trunks and dropping
down among them and stepping on them again, apparently as a schoolboy
might have done, but assuredly with no schoolboy purpose, or want of
purpose.

'What are you up to?' muttered Riderhood, down in the ditch, and holding
the hedge a little open with both hands. And soon his actions made a
most extraordinary reply. 'By George and the Draggin!' cried Riderhood,
'if he ain't a going to bathe!'

He had passed back, on and among the trunks of trees again, and has
passed on to the water-side and had begun undressing on the grass. For
a moment it had a suspicious look of suicide, arranged to counterfeit
accident. 'But you wouldn't have fetched a bundle under your arm, from
among that timber, if such was your game!' said Riderhood. Nevertheless
it was a relief to him when the bather after a plunge and a few strokes
came out. 'For I shouldn't,' he said in a feeling manner, 'have liked to
lose you till I had made more money out of you neither.'

Prone in another