If their luck had been out earlier, it was now in. The cart was loaded and the farmer ready to depart. Five minutes later and they’d have missed him. As it was, they left Headbourne Worthy perched on the box seat of a cart carrying pigs. Nine pigs, altogether. Willie had counted. And handsome pigs they were, too. Black, with a white stripe over their shoulders.
The farmer was as garrulous as the blacksmith had been taciturn. He talked about his pigs and his other livestock and his crops and the spring just past and the summer they were having. Willie sat on the wooden seat and simply enjoyed it all: the fresh country air, the trees and the hedgerows, the grassy verges studded with wildflowers, the birdsong, the noises the pigs made, the slow clop-clop of the horse, the farmer’s conversati
