The children went to the seaside for a month, and lived in a flint
village on the bare windy chalk Downs, quite thirty miles away from
home. They made friends with an old shepherd, called Mr. Dudeney, who
had known their father when their father was little. He did not talk
like their own people in the Weald of Sussex, and he used different
names for farm things, but he understood how they felt, and let them go
with him. He had a tiny cottage about half a mile from the village,
where his wife made mead from thyme honey, and nursed sick lambs in
front of a coal fire, while Old Jim, who was Mr. Dudeney's sheep-dog's
father, lay at the door. They brought up beef bones for Old Jim (you
must never give a sheep-dog mutton bones), and if Mr. Dudeney happened
to be far in the Downs, Mrs. Dudeney would tell the dog to take them to
him, and he did.
One August afternoon when the village water-cart had made the street
smell specially townified, they went to look for their shepherd as
usual, and, as usual, Old Jim crawled over the door-step and took them
in charge. The sun was hot, the dry grass was very slippery, and the
distances were very distant.
'It's just like the sea,' said Una, when Old Jim halted in the shade of
a lonely flint barn on a bare rise. 'You see where you're going,
and--you go there, and there's nothing between.'
Dan slipped off his shoes. 'When we get home I shall sit in the woods
all day,' he said.
'Whuff!' said Old Jim, to show he was ready, and struck across a long
rolling stretch of turf. Presently he asked for his beef bone.
'Not yet,' said Dan. 'Where's Mr. Dudeney? Where's master?'
Old Jim looked as if he thought they were mad, and asked again.
'Don't you give it him,' Una cried. 'I'm not going to be left howling in
a desert.'
'Show, boy! Show!' said Dan, for the Downs seemed as bare as the palm of
your hand.
Old Jim sighed, and trotted forward. Soon they spied the blob of Mr.
Dudeney's hat against the sky a long way off.
'Right! All right!' said Dan. Old Jim wheeled round, took his bone
carefully between his blunted teeth, and returned to the shadow of the
old barn, looking just like a wolf. The children went on. Two kestrels
hung bivvering and squealing above them. A gull flapped lazily along the
white edge of the cliffs. The curves of the Downs shook a little in the
heat, and so did Mr. Dudeney's distant head.
They walked toward it very slowly and found themselves staring into a
horse-shoe-shaped hollow a hundred feet deep, whose steep sides were
laced with tangled sheep-tracks. The flock grazed on the flat at the
bottom, under charge of Young Jim. Mr. Dudeney sat comfortably knitting
on the edge of the slope, his crook between his knees. They told him
what Old Jim had done.
'Ah, he thought you could see my head as soon as he did. The closeter
you be to the turf the more you see things. You look warm-like,' said
Mr. Dudeney.
'We be,' said Una, flopping down. '_And_ tired.'
'Set beside o' me here. The shadow'll begin to stretch out in a little
while, and a heat-shake o' wind will come up with it that'll overlay
your eyes like so much wool.'
'We don't want to sleep,' said Una indignantly; but she settled herself
as she spoke, in the first strip of early afternoon shade.
'O' course not. You come to talk with me same as your father used. _He_
didn't need no dog to guide him to Norton Pit.'
'Well, he belonged here,' said Dan, and laid himself down at length on
the turf.
'He did. And what beats me is why he went off to live among them messy
trees in the Weald, when he might ha' stayed here and looked all about
him. There's no profit to trees. They draw the lightning, and sheep
shelter under 'em, and _so_, like as not, you'll lose a half score ewes
struck dead in one storm. Tck! Your father knew that.'
'Trees aren't messy.' Una rose on her elbow. 'And what about firewood? I
don't like coal.'
'Eh? You lie a piece more up-hill and you'll lie more natural,' said
Mr. Dudeney, with his provoking deaf smile. 'Now press your face down
and smell to the turf. That's Southdown thyme which makes our Southdown
mutton beyond compare, and, my mother told me, 'twill cure anything
except broken necks, or hearts. I forget which.'
They sniffed, and somehow forgot to lift their cheeks from the soft
thymy cushions.
'You don't get nothing like that in the Weald. Watercress, maybe?' said
Mr. Dudeney.
'But we've water--brooks full of it--where you paddle in hot weather,'
Una replied, watching a yellow-and-violet-banded snail-shell close to
her eye.
'Brooks flood. Then you must shift your sheep--let alone foot-rot
afterward. I put more dependence on a dew-pond any day.'
'How's a dew-pond made?' said Dan, and tilted his hat over his eyes. Mr.
Dudeney explained.
The air trembled a little as though it could not make up its mind
whether to slide into the Pit or move across the open. But it seemed
easiest to go down-hill, and the children felt one soft puff after
another slip and sidle down the slope in fragrant breaths that baffed on
their eyelids. The little whisper of the sea by the cliffs joined with
the whisper of the wind over the grass, the hum of insects in the thyme,
the ruffle and rustle of the flock below, and a thickish mutter deep in
the very chalk beneath them. Mr. Dudeney stopped explaining, and went on
with his knitting.
They were roused by voices. The shadow had crept half-way down the steep
side of Norton's Pit, and on the edge of it, his back to them, Puck sat
beside a half-naked man who seemed busy at some work. The wind had
dropped, and in that funnel of ground every least noise and movement
reached them like whispers up a water-pipe.
'That is clever,' said Puck, leaning over. 'How truly you shape it!'
'Yes, but what does The Beast care for a brittle flint tip? Bah!' The
man flicked something contemptuously over his shoulder. It fell between
Dan and Una--a beautiful dark-blue flint arrow-head still hot from the
maker's hand.
The man reached for another stone, and worked away like a thrush with a
snail-shell.
'Flint work is fool's work,' he said at last. 'One does it because one
always did it, but when it comes to dealing with The Beast--no good!' He
shook his shaggy head.
'The Beast was dealt with long ago. He has gone,' said Puck.
'He'll be back at lambing-time. _I_ know him.' He chipped very
carefully, and the flints squeaked.
'Not he. Children can lie out on the Chalk now all day through and go
home safe.'
'Can they? Well, call The Beast by his True Name, and I'll believe it,'
the man replied.
'Surely!' Puck leaped to his feet, curved his hands round his mouth and
shouted: "Wolf! Wolf!"
Norton's Pit threw back the echo from its dry sides--'Wuff! Wuff!' like
Young Jim's bark.
'You see? You hear?' said Puck. 'Nobody answers. Grey Shepherd is gone.
Feet-in-the-Night has run off. There are no more wolves.'
'Wonderful!' The man wiped his forehead as though he were hot. 'Who
drove him away? You?'
'Many men through many years, each working in his own country. Were you
one of them?' Puck answered.
The man slid his sheepskin cloak to his waist, and without a word
pointed to his side, which was all seamed and blotched with scars. His
arms too were dimpled from shoulder to elbow with horrible white
dimples.
'I see,' said Puck. 'It is The Beast's mark. What did you use against
him?'
'Hand, hammer, and spear, as our fathers did before us.'
'So? Then how'--Puck twitched aside the man's dark-brown cloak--'how did
a Flint-worker come by _that_? Show, man, show!' He held out his little
hand.
The man slipped a long dark iron knife, almost a short sword, from his
belt, and after breathing on it, handed it hilt-first to Puck, who took
it with his head on one side, as you should when you look at the works
of a watch, squinted down the dark blade, and very delicately rubbed his
forefinger from the point to the hilt.
'Good!' said he, in a surprised tone.
'It should be. The Children of the Night made it,' the man answered.
'So I see by the iron. What might it have cost you?'
'This!' The man raised his hand to his cheek. Puck whistled like a Weald
starling.
'By the Great Rings of the Chalk!' he cried. 'Was _that_ your price?
Turn sunward that I may see better, and shut your eye.'
He slipped his hand beneath the man's chin and swung him till he faced
the children up the slope. They saw that his right eye was gone, and the
eyelid lay shrunk. Quickly Puck turned him round again, and the two sat
down.
'It was for the sheep. The sheep are the people,' said the man, in an
ashamed voice. 'What else could I have done? _You_ know, Old One.'