“Whenever it may be necessary that you and I should have any further communication together,” said Bradley, “I will come back. Good night!”
“Well, since no better can be,” said Riderhood, turning on his heel, “Good night!” But he turned 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 riverside—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