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"If you want to go anywhere, I suppose it would be," I replied.

"I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m thinkin’ of you who’ve got to live with her. She’ll burn her tubes if she loses her water?"

"She will."

"I’ve never scorched yet, and I’m not beginnin’ now." He shut off steam firmly. "Out you get, Pye, an’ shove her along by hand."

"Where to?"

"The nearest water-tank," was the reply. "And Sussex is a dry county."

"She ought to have drag-ropes—little pipe-clayed ones," said Pyecroft.

We got out and pushed under the hot sun for half a mile till we came to a cottage, sparsely inhabited by one child who wept.

"All out haymakin’, o’ course," said Pyecroft, thrusting his head into the parlour for an instant. "What’s the evolution now?"

"Skirmish till we find a well," I said.

"Hmm! But they wouldn’t ’ave left that kid without a chaperon, so to say . . . I thought so! Where’s a stick?"

A bluish and silent beast of the true old sheepdog breed glided from behind an outhouse and without words fell to work.

Pyecroft kept him at bay with a rake-handle while our party, in rallying-square, retired along the box-bordered brick path to the car.

At the garden gate the dumb devil halted, looked back on the child, and sat down to scratch.

"That’s his three-mile limit, thank Heaven!"