The gypsy’s mare was grazing by herself behind them.

The girl steadied to a halt and watched her critically, calling Billy
Bluff to heel.

She didn’t want the boisterous young dog to worry the old mare just now, and it was clear that Four Pound didn’t want it either.

As Billy Bluff skirmished about, she put back her ears and lowered her head with an irritable motion; but she was far too lazy to make the charge she threatened.

The girl’s inspection made, and conclusions drawn, she pursued her way up the hill, popped her pony over the low post and rails which fenced off the Paddock Close from the untamed Downs, and walked leisurely over the brow, the gorse warm and smelling in the sun.

Beneath her a valley stretched away to the sea.  There the cliff rose steeply to a lighthouse, standing on a bare summit; dipped, and rose again.  In the hollow between the two hills a white coastguard station sentinelled the Gap, across which the line of the sea stretched like a silver wire.

Nobody was yet astir save a ploughman driving a team of slow-moving oxen to the fields.  To Boy the beauty of the early morning lay in the fact that she had the hills and heavens and seas to herself, and could enjoy them in her own way without thought of interference from a world too frivolous, too feverish, and above all too loud, to understand.

As she rode along, her young face was uplifted to catch the rivulets of song that came pouring down on her from the blue.

She dropped down the hill, disturbing the rabbits busy in the dew, and bursting through the cables of gossamer that tried to stay her.  A kestrel hovered over the gorse, and she marked a badger on the hillside shuffling home before Man and his Dogs began the old rowdy-dowdy game once more.

Happily Billy Bluff, who was always too much absorbed in the object immediately beneath his nose to take long views, did not see him.  And the girl was glad.  Sport, in so far as it meant killing the creatures of the wilderness for pleasure, made no appeal to her.  She had no desire whatever to see a fight between the badger and Billy Bluff.  The badger had in her judgment many qualities.  She respected his desire for freedom and determination to go his own way.  Also if the pair fought, the girl shrewdly suspected that Billy Bluff, big though he was, and bold as a lion, might be worsted.  For Billy, after all, was decadent according to the standards of the wilderness.

He lived on a chain, protected by the police, and fed by hand.  Every man was not his enemy, and he had not to hunt for each meal or go without.  Billy Bluff, however fine a fellow he might be in his own eyes, was a poor creature in that of Warrior Badger.  Civilization, if it had given him much of which the badger recked nothing, had also taken her toll of him.

Thinking vaguely thus, the girl once down the hill caught hold of Ragamuffin and spun him along the valley between the hills till she came to the coastguard station, straggling like a flock of sheep across the Gap.