On this matter he said much, which, had he been a better tactician,
he might probably have left unspoken. He then went on to the story of
his own quarrel with Nokes, who had, in truth, been grossly impudent
to the women about the house, but who had been punished by instant
and violent dismissal from his employment. It was evidently Harry's
idea that a man who had so sinned against his master should be
allowed to find no other master--at any rate in that district; an
idea with which the other man, who had lately come out from the old
country, did not at all sympathize.

"Do you want me to dismiss him?" said Medlicot, in a tone which
implied that that would be the last thing he would think of doing.

"You haven't heard me yet." Then Harry went on and told of the fires
in the heat of summer, and of their terrible effects--of the easy
manner of revenge which they supplied to angry, unscrupulous men, and
of his own fears at the present moment.

"I can believe it all," said Medlicot, "and am very sorry that it
should be so. But I can not see the justice of punishing a man on the
merest, vaguest suspicion. Your only ground for imputing this crime
to him is that your own conduct to him may have given him a motive."

Harry had schooled himself vigorously during the ride as to his own
demeanor, and had resolved that he would be cool. "I was going on to
tell you," he said, "what occurred that night after I saw you up by
the fence." Then he described how he and his boy had entered the
shed, and had both seen and heard a man as he escaped from it; how
the boy had at once declared that the man was Nokes; how the
following day he had discovered the leaves, which Nokes no doubt had