Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/251

Rh if Abe would call it fair play. But all was fair in love and war: he kept saying this over to himself, and then lit another pipe to think it out.

Well, he couldn't; and so, after a third pipe, he pulled an old French cloak out of his knapsack and wrapped himself in it and huddled himself to sleep there on the slope of the hillside.

When he woke up the sun was shining and the smoke coming up towards him from the chimneys, and all about him the larks a-dinging just as they'd carried on every fine morning since he'd left Ardevora. And somehow, though he had dropped asleep in a puzzle of mind, he woke up with not a doubt to trouble him. He hunted out a crust from his knapsack and made his breakfast, and then he lit his pipe again and turned towards Penzance. He was going to play fair.

On he went in this frame of mind, feeling like a man almost too virtuous to go to church, until by-and-by he came in sight of Nancledrea and the inn he'd left in such a hurry over night. And who should be sitting in the porchway, and looking into the bottom of a pint pot, but Abe Cummins!

"Why, however on earth did you come here?" asked Billy.

"Cap'en landed us between four and five this morning," said Abe.

"Well," said Billy, "I'm right glad to meet you, anyway, for—tell 'ee the truth—you're the very man I was looking for."