As they rode by, Strange and Jeremy stood up in the stirrups and craned their necks to catch a glimpse of whatever it was that the villagers were looking at.

“Well, that is odd!” exclaimed Jeremy when they were past. “There was nothing there!”

“No,” said Strange, “there was a man. I am not surprized you could not see him. At first I took him for a hedge-root, but it was definitely a man – a grey, gaunt, weather-worn man – a man remarkably like a hedge-root, but a man nevertheless.”

The road led them into a dark winter wood. Jeremy John’s curiosity had been excited and he wondered who the man could be and what the villagers were intending to do to him. Strange answered once or twice at random, but soon fell to thinking of Miss Woodhope.

“It will be best to avoid discussing the changes brought on by my father’s death,” he thought. “It is altogether too dangerous. I will begin with light, indifferent subjects – the adventures of this journey for example. Now, what has happened that will amuse her?” He looked up. Dark, dripping trees surrounded him. “There must have been something.” He remembered a windmill he had seen near Hereford with a child’s red cloak caught up on one of the sails. As the sails turned the cloak was one moment being dragged through the slush and the mud and the next flying through the air like a vivid scarlet flag. “Like an allegory of something or other. Then I can tell her about the empty village and the children at the window peeping out between the curtains, one with a doll in her hand and the other with a wooden horse. Next come the silent crowd with their weapons and the man beneath the hedge.”

Oh! she was certain to say, Poor man! What happened to him? – I do not know, Strange would say. But surely you stayed to help him, she would say. No, Strange would say. Oh!, she would say …

“Wait!” cried Strange, reining in his horse. “This will not do at all! We must go back. I do not feel easy in my mind about the man under the hedge.”

“Oh!” cried Jeremy Johns, in relief. “I am very glad to hear you say so, sir. Neither am I.”

“I don’t suppose you thought to bring a set of pistols, did you?” said Strange.

“No, sir.”

“D—!” said Strange and then flinched a little, because Miss Woodhope did not approve of oaths. “What about a knife? Something of that sort?”

“No, nothing, sir. But do not fret.” Jeremy jumped off his horse and went delving about in the undergrowth. “I can make us some clubs out of these branches which will do almost as well as pistols.”

There were some stout branches which someone had cut from a coppice of trees and left lying on the ground. Jeremy picked one up and offered it to Strange. It was scarcely a club, more a branch with twigs growing out of it.