THERE had been some strange scenes enacted in the Half Moon inn. As a posting-house, situated on the main road from the south to the north, it was used by all sorts and conditions of people-runaway couples flying to what they fondly hoped was the goal of bliss, Gretna Green; debtors seeking to evade justice; cattlemen and horsemen; sheep-farmers and huntsmen; gentlemen and blacklegs. Men in their cups had quarrelled and fought, and gamblers had been taken redhanded and trounced. But never before, perhaps, had a scene, at once so pathetic, so full of the elements of paternal agony and the black baseness of human devilry, been witnessed as that between the blunt, honest woodman and ex-soldier, d**k Jopling, and the thrifty, cunning, false-hearted attorney clerk, Ralph Tinker. The townsmen wh
