The Square Peg or The Gun Fella

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Robert Frampton Mansell, the inventor and manufacturer of the Mansell Gun, stopped his car, and leaned from his driving-seat, to call to the ditcher at the roadside. “Is this the way to Mullples?”

“Yes,” the man called. “You keep on, like you be going to Hicks’s. That’s a farm, Hicks’s. Then you turn at the gate. It’s all wrote up, on the gate.”

“Is it far?”

“No, not to say far. ’Tis a step.”

“Thanks.”

“Very welcome, surely,” the man said.

He set the car moving, and looked at the car mirror, to see the two people behind him; his fiancée, Margaret Holtspur, a woman of over thirty, with a face both grave and merry, and his old father, Bob Mansell, a frail and sweet old man.

“We’re on the track,” he said. “The chap knew it.”

“We’re enjoying ourselves,” Margaret said.

It was a drive to enjoy. They were in a new, fine country, in bright October weather, all the brighter for a little rain the night before. The hips were scarlet in the hedges; the roots intensely green against the plough.

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