“Ooh, yes!” said Brenda.
But the question was aimed at Mr. Masterfield and, to Gair’s astonishment, Mr. Masterfield laughed, and laughed quite naturally. “Why not?” he said. This had nothing to do with the collar. Gair could feel it pulsing as coldly and strongly as ever. Either Giants had some source of strength Gair did not know about, or Mr. Claybury had worked powerful magic.
“Very well,” Mr. Claybury said happily. And this was the story he told—and he told it very well, too, Gair thought, as well as Banot might.
George and Jerry were hanging onto that signpost and howling out a song about someone called Nelly Dean as hard as they could howl, when a strange little man suddenly hopped out of the ditch and came toward them.
“I wonder if you two could do me a favor,” he said.
They stopped their song and did their best to look at him. They found him rather hard to see in their state. His clothes kept melting into the moonlight, but they could discern that he was fair, with a fair beard, and that he was laughing at their condition. Jerry was somewhat incensed at this, and drew himself up with dignity. Unfortunately, he forgot to let go of the signpost. The post came out of the ground and George slid in a heap to the grass. But Jerry was never one to let details bother him. He simply cradled the signpost in his arms and demanded, “Who the devil are you, you funny little man?”
George thought the little man was rather annoyed at Jerry’s tone, and also much impressed by his strength. But he was tired of being on the ground, so he said, “Put the signpost back, Jerry. I need it.”
Jerry seemed rather surprised to find he was carrying a signpost. “How did I get this, George?” he said. “It seems to be a signpost. Shall we take it home as a souvenir?”
“No,” said George. “I need it. Put it back.”
Jerry did his honest best to put the signpost back, and George did his best to help him, but they got into great difficulties, because George could not find the hole to put it in and Jerry found several, all over the place. Every time the signpost fell over it seemed funnier. The little man seemed to find it quite as funny. They were all helpless with laughter by the time the little man planted it himself in the right place. And the darned thing started to fall over again. But the little man was not having that. He said one or two strange words, rather severely, to the signpost, and it promptly stood as firm as a rock.
“I think it’s the wrong way round,” George said, peering at the names on its arms, but, as nobody felt this mattered, he sat down to have a rest.
Jerry, meanwhile, had decided that the little man was one of his best friends. “Good old Titch!” he said, and made the little fellow utter a sort of croak by flinging an arm round him. “Didn’t you want us to do you a favor?”
“That’s right,” said the little man, sounding rather surprised that he should remember. And he pointed to something in the field beyond the hedge. “Would you mind very much moving that stone for me?”
Jerry hurt George’s head by laughing. “Hey, George! Titch wants us to move the Gallows Stone!”
“Shan’t,” said George. He was getting sleepy. “Don’t hold with capital punishment.”
“Don’t be a fool. It’s not been used that way for centuries. Take a look.”
Titch kindly helped George flounder up beside Jerry, and he seemed to find it quite a strain when George leaned on him. This was quite odd, because, in actual fact, George and he were much the same size. It was just that Titch seemed smaller, if you see what I mean. Anyway, George was finally able to stare across at a mound, near the edge of the Moor, which had a huge boulder balanced on top of it. On a rough estimate, by moonlight, it was about half the size of a haystack. “We can’t move that!” George protested.
“Not if we both heaved?” said Jerry, who was much taken with the idea.
George remembered that he had certain responsibilities toward Jerry. “Got to get you to church in one piece,” he said.
“True,” said Jerry. “Sorry, Titch. Home, George. I need a drink.” There was nothing he needed less just then.
Titch, at this, became curiously desperate. “Would you try to move it if I offered you a reward?” he said.
“George,” said Jerry, “Titch is now offering us a reward if we move the Gallows Stone.”
George woke up, feeling unmistakable interest. “How much?”
“This collar,” said Titch, and he put his hands to his neck. As far as they could see, he was not wearing any kind of collar. Titch seemed to realize he was not, too, and took his hands away again, looking rather at a loss. “I’ll give you a solid gold collar,” he said. He seemed to mean it.
“I had a gold collar-stud once,” George said wistfully. “Mind you, I prefer my collars made of cloth, come to think of it. Gold, did you say?”
“Yes, a gold collar,” said Titch.
“It’s no good, George,” said Jerry, who had been considering the matter. “It’s too big. We couldn’t move it for a whole gold suit. It would take a bulldozer.”
Here, both Jerry and George were struck with the same splendid idea. They turned to one another, swaying in the moonlight.
“Do you think we could?” said George. “I can’t drive.”
“I can try,” said Jerry. “It would be a lark, and we haven’t done anything yet tonight, have we?”
“The night is young!” shouted George. “Come on.”
Jerry shouted to Titch to come on, and they all three ran like madmen, down the branch of the road which the signpost now wrongly asserted led to Oxford. In fact, it led to Marsh End Farm. Now, it is one of the more remarkable things about being drunk that, even when you can hardly stand, you can run like the wind and even find breath to talk.
“We have to do something,” George explained to Titch as he sprinted. “We’ve just finished Finals, and Jerry’s getting married tomorrow. Silly fool, isn’t he?”
“You don’t think I’m a silly fool, do you, Titch?” Jerry said plaintively.
Titch, who did not seem in the least out of breath, although his legs were fairly twinkling along, said that he did not think Jerry was a fool at all. “If you can move that stone,” he said, “I shall be married tomorrow, too.”
“Hear that, George?” Jerry panted. “Titch is getting married tomorrow, too!”
It occurred to George that Titch’s family must have some very odd marriage customs, if they required bridegrooms to heave stones about, but before he could say so, they arrived in the dark and odorous farmyard of Marsh End Farm. They had, as I said, been there several times that night, and, as happened each time, a confounded dog stood up on the end of its chain and tried to eat them, making the air hideous with its barking. But Titch said something to it quietly, and it stopped, just like that, and lay down again. Which left Jerry and George free to hurl handfuls of farmyard at the upstairs window and yodel for Marianne.
After a while, the light went on, and this young lady’s auntie stuck her tousled head out of the window. By this time, she was understandably irritated. “If it isn’t you two again!” she said. “Go away. I’ve had about enough of your drunken yelling.”
They sang to soothe her. “Please, Marianne,” sang George. And Jerry caroled, “We want to borrow a tractor.”
“The idea!” said this young lady’s auntie. “I’ll have our dad come after you with his shotgun if I hear any more tonight!”
“A tractor!” they sang.
“Go away,” said Marianne, and she shut the window and turned out her light.
“How about that?” said George. He did not like shotguns.
“The old man’s down at the pub still,” said Jerry. “We did ask, and she didn’t say no.” And he boldly led the way to the shed where the old man kept a tractor. Titch, when he saw it, pulled his little fair beard and looked dubious, but he did not say anything. George said they would need some rope, too. “Chains,” said Jerry. “They’re much stronger.” He found a whole lot in a corner of the shed and told Titc
h to put them in the back of the tractor. Titch carried them easily enough, but he seemed more doubtful than ever. They asked him why.
“You people put so much faith in iron,” he said. “I don’t altogether trust it myself.”
“Carry them over and don’t argue,” said Jerry.
Titch did so, but as soon as he reached the tractor he looked sick and asked why it smelled so horrible. Jerry told him it was only diesel oil. But, since Titch seemed on the way to getting really ill, and the sight affected George profoundly, too, Jerry told them to wait outside while he tried to start the tractor. Much relieved, they went and leaned on the gate, where the dog watched them placidly, and George became confiding.
“I’m going to be a great man, Titch,” he said. “I want you to believe that. One of these days, everyone’s going to be talking about George Claybury, self-made man.” And he said many other absurd things as well, being young and foolish and, as I think I have remarked, very drunk besides. Titch, to do him credit, listened very patiently and did not try to interrupt with advice. And, fortunately, just as George had got onto his unhappy childhood and started to cry, he was interrupted by a vast, vibrant chugging. Jerry and the tractor came backward out of the farmyard at an unexpectedly high speed. It was halfway to the crossroads before either of them came to their senses.
“After him!” howled George.
As they pelted up the road, the lights came on in the farmhouse and Marianne leaned out of it, screaming abuse. The dog, released from whatever hold Titch had had on it, joined in the clamor. But neither George nor Titch could spare any attention for the farm. Jerry, having knocked the signpost crooked again, went through the hedge on the other side of the road and across the field beyond in a series of sumptuous loops. His companions scrambled after him, wondering if he could stop before he came to Edinburgh or not at all. Luckily, the tractor stalled on its way up the mound which held the Gallows Stone.
“I got here!” Jerry bawled proudly. “Backward.”
“Splendid fellow!” gasped George. “Eyes in the back of your head!”
The next step was to harness the tractor to the Gallows Stone. George and Jerry thought they did it rather well. They scrambled over and around that huge boulder, looping their chains, until it was in a sort of chain cage. Then they took the last length of chain to hook to the back of the tractor. But it became more and more evident that Titch did not trust those chains at all. He seemed to find it necessary to go round touching every place where the chains crossed or joined, muttering more of his weird words to them.
While he was doing it, Jerry and George suddenly found they were cold sober.
Now it may have been the drink wearing off with the hard work in the fresh air, but I think it was more likely the queer way Titch was muttering, combined with the fact that they could see the farmhouse from the mound, angrily lit at every window. At any rate, they both found themselves thinking of shotguns and Magistrates and suchlike unpleasant things.
“Look here, you!” Jerry called to Titch.
“If you’ve quite finished that muttering,” added George. “Who are you and why do you want this stone moved anyway?”
They did not mean to be unfriendly, you understand, just firm. But when Titch came from behind the stone, he was so downright dismayed to see them sober that they became thoroughly suspicious. It seemed to them that, if Titch was not wrong in the head, he was trying to get them into trouble.
“You’ve got us into a fine fix, haven’t you?” said George.
“We’ll have to pacify the farmer,” Jerry explained. “And my old man, too, I’m much afraid. Not to speak of all my relatives who are down for the wedding.”
“Not to mince matters, there’ll be a Stink,” said George. “If you really want this stone moved, you prove your good faith and show us that gold you promised us.”
“Yes. Produce it. Prove yourself,” said Jerry. “We don’t shift this ruddy rock an inch otherwise.”
Titch looked both dismayed and exasperated. But he seemed faintly amused, too, as if Jerry and George were behaving according to some absurd pattern. “All right,” he said. “But I shall have to fetch the gold. Will you wait here five minutes?”
“Uh-uh!” said George. “We know that one, little man.”
“I’m not trying to run away,” Titch said. Then he unbuckled the sword he had at his side and laid it in Jerry’s hands. “You can keep that till I come back.”
They looked at it. It struck them as something you might find in a museum, and they thought it might fetch a fair price in an antique shop. George nodded. “O.K. Fair enough,” said Jerry.
Titch set off at a run across the field. It was hard to see far in the moonlight, but they both thought they saw him reach another, slightly lower mound there. Then he vanished. They were fairly sure they had seen the last of him, and they began to calculate whether the sword was likely to fetch enough to make up for the Stink. They were tinkering with the tractor, trying to start it again, when Titch suddenly reappeared beside them. He seemed breathless and rather triumphant.
“Got the gold?” George asked, not really thinking he had.
“Here,” said Titch. He held up into the moonlight a fabulous fiery green torque. It was not only solid gold. It glittered and twisted with the most intricate and delicate patterns. It was probably the most valuable thing either George or Jerry had seen in their lives. They both reached out to take the golden horseshoe. Titch, naturally enough, held it out of reach. “When the stone’s moved,” he said.
“If you like,” said Jerry. “This is a bit of all right, eh, George?”
“I’ll say!” said George. “Get her started, Jerry. Where to, Titch?”
“To that mound over there,” Titch said, and pointed to the mound across the field where he had seemed to disappear.
This did not seem a very tall order, for a thing like that collar. Jerry got the tractor started in seconds. It began to roar and vibrate. The chains scrawked and tightened. The stone jerked, then shifted. Titch stood there, and so did George, to tell the truth, marveling at the strength of that machine. It growled. It juddered. Once or twice it stood still with its great back wheels whirling, but the stone, securely netted in the chains Titch had muttered to, went on moving. It bumped down the mound it sat on, and Titch was not the only one who encouraged it with strange noises. George shouted things, too. And it began to crawl like a huge snail ponderously onto the level.
Then—this was the queerest thing of all—as soon as that boulder had reached level ground, George felt a gush of cold air and a whirring behind him. He and Titch both spun round to see what it was. There was nothing, nothing at all to see. But the whirring went on upward into the dark blue sky and, with it, faint sounds of laughter and music. Jerry heard it, too. He turned round and shouted from his shaking perch on the tractor, “What was that? Something went up out of the mound, I swear!”
George shivered and shouted to him to keep going and not to stall. “What was it?” he asked Titch.
“I don’t know.” It was clear Titch had no more idea than George. “Something glad to be free, by the sound of it,” he said.
After that, the stone crawled and bumped over the field and then up the other mound almost without interruption. There was a bad moment when it was halfway up this mound, and the tractor was halfway down the other side, and the two forces seemed exactly equal. But George and Titch set their backs to the stone and heaved, and it went on again. A minute later, it was perched on top of this second mound much as it had been perched on the other. Titch walked proudly up to it and spoke a few more of his well-chosen words, whereupon the chains literally fell off it into George’s arms and the stone looked as if it had been in that place for centuries. While George was staggering about with the chains, Jerry must have given Titch back his sword and Titch passed him the gold collar, but George never knew for sure. He became very vague about everything around then. In fact, neither he nor Jerry quite knew how they got ho
me or what they did with the tractor. When the inevitable Stink started, they were both hard put to it to explain. George would have thought he dreamed the whole thing, but for the fact that, while he was looking for the tractor after Jerry had left on his honeymoon, he found the marks the stone had made being dragged across that field, and the stone at the end of them, perched on the lower mound.
“Well?” said Mr. Claybury. “What do you think of that?”
“Lovely!” said Brenda, clearing away the last of the plates. Ayna looked at Gair’s grave face and was not so sure. It had become ever more clear, as the story went on, that Mr. Claybury’s little man had indeed been Gest. She did not like to think of her father blithely passing two drunken Giants a collar with a curse on it. She could only hope Gest had not known it was cursed. So did Gair, but he was not at all sure. Gest had already parted with his own collar to the Dorig, and it had plainly been urgent to find another. He had an idea that the story, as told in Garholt, suggested that Aunt Kasta came into it somehow—but, as Gest had cheated Og by asking the Giants to move the stone, why should he not have cheated the Giants, too? Gair did not like it at all.
Mr. Masterfield, who had been laughing more heartily than anyone, and was still smiling, turned jokingly to Ayna. “The collar in question,” he said. “Whose is it going to be?”
Because he put it like this, Ayna’s Gift took over. She might have vowed not to use it, but she could not help answering when people asked her things like this. “It’s not going to be anyone’s,” she said. “It’s going back where it came from to have the curse raised from it.”