He had triumphed. He had beaten down the last resistance of the enemy, won the last stronghold of Boarzell. It was all his now, from the clayey pastures at its feet to the fir-clump of its crown. A trivial event which he had been able to seize and turn to his advantage had unexpectedly given him the victory.

The Squire had called it blackmail and made a terrible fuss about it, but from the first the issues had been in Reuben\'s hands. A public scandal, the appearance of Flightshot\'s heir before the county magistrates on the charge of shooting a cow in a drunken frolic, was simply not to be contemplated; the only son of the Manor must not be sacrificed to make a rustic holiday. After all, ever since the Inclosure the Fair had been merely a matter of toleration; and as Backfield pointed out, it could easily go elsewhere—to the big Tillingham[Pg 455] meadow outside Rye, for instance, where the wild beast shows pitched when they came. All things considered, resistance was not worth while, and Flightshot made its last capitulation to Odiam.

Of course there was a tremendous outcry in Peasmarsh and the neighbourhood. Everyone knew that the Fair was doomed—Backfield would never allow it to be held on his land. His ploughs and his harrows were merely waiting for the negotiations to be finished before leaping, as it were, upon this their last prey. He would even cut down the sentinel firs that for hundreds of years had kept grim and lonely watch over the Sussex fields—had seen old Peasen Mersch when it was only a group of hovels linked with the outside world by lanes like ditches, and half the country a moor like the Boar\'s Hyll.

The actual means by which he acquired the Fair-place never quite transpired, for the farm-men were paid for their silence by Sir Eustace, and also had a kindly feeling for young George which persisted after the money was spent. However, one or two of the prevalent rumours were worse for Reuben than the facts, and if anyone, in farmhouse or cottage, had ever had a grudging kindness for the man who had wrested a victory out of the tyrant earth, he forgot it now.

But Reuben did not care. He had won his heart\'s desire, and public opinion could go where everything else he was supposed to value, and didn\'t, had gone. In a way he was sorry, for he would have liked to discuss his triumph at the Cocks, seasoning it with pints of decadent ale. As things were, he had no one to talk it over with but the farm-men, who grumbled because it meant more work—Maude, who said she\'d be sorry when all t............