"What! Stephen Holgrave!" said the warm-hearted Lucy, springing down the stairs; but, light and quick as was her step, another reached the bottom before her, and, with a faint shriek, Margaret Holgrave fell on her husband's neck.He had become separated from the other searchers, and was alone on the west side of the Moor. The wind barked and howled, hurling itself upon him as he stood, beating his face with hail, which hissed into the dead tangles of the heather, while the stripped thorns yapped and rattled, and the bushes roared. So great was the tumult that he seemed to fall into it like a stone into a waveit passed over him, round him, seemed even to pass under him, he was hardly conscious of the solid ground. The blackness was impenetrable, save where his lantern stained it with a yellow smudge. He shouted, but his voice perished in the dinit seemed as if his whole man, sight, voice, hearing, and sensation, was blurring into the storm, as if Boarzell had swamped him at last, made him merely one of its hundred voices, mocking the manhood which had tried so much against its earth.The population had altered too. Old Gideon Teazel had died some years ago, and his son Jasper was boss in his place. He was unlike his father both in character and physique, an undersized little ruffian, seasoned by a long career in horse-stealing, who beat his wife openly on the caravan steps, and boasted that he had landed more flats at thimble-rig than any thimble-engro in England. He would have cheated the shirt off any man at the Show, and established a sort of ascendancy through sheer dread of his cunning. The only man who did not fear him was Mexico Bill, a half-breed in charge of the cocoanut shie. Mexico Bill feared only the man who could knock him out, and that man had not yet been found in Boarzell Fair. As a matter of fact he was usually pretty genial and docile, but he had been wounded in the head by Indians long ago, and [Pg 352]sometimes went mad and ran amok. On these occasions the only thing to do was to trip him up, and enrol as many volunteers as possible to sit on him till he came to his senses."You need not trouble yourself," replied Holgrave: "what I want to do I can do myself."
