"Don't you go for trying this silly game again, young fellow." After delivering himself thus in a stern whisper, strained almost to extinction, he drove on, ruminating solemnly.

To his mind the incident remained somewhat obscure.

But his intellect, though it had lost its pristine vivacity in the benumbing years of sedentary exposure to the weather, lacked not independence or sanity.

Gravely he dismissed the hypothesis of Stevie being a drunken young nipper.
Inside the cab the spell of silence, in which the two women had endured shoulder to shoulder the jolting, rattling, and jingling of the journey, had been broken by Stevie's outbreak.

Winnie raised her voice.
"You've done what you wanted, mother.