Two months after the disaster, Gabriel stands at the Casterbridge hiring fair among two or three hundred labourers, each wearing the badge of his trade: whip-cord for carters, straw for thatchers, a crook for shepherds. Men call him 'Sir', and he answers that he is looking for a bailiff's place. He is paler and sadder than before, and calmer too, as if ruin had left him something. Nobody hires him. He changes his overcoat for a smock and spends two shillings on a crook, and then the farmers who stop to talk all turn away at the same question. 'Who's farm were you upon last?' 'My own.' They treat the answer like a rumour of cholera: a man who has been his own master cannot be trusted. At dusk he takes out his flute and plays 'Jockey to the Fair' as if he had never known a sorrow, and half an hour of it earns more than he has seen for weeks. Asking about the next day's fair, he learns that Weatherbury, where Bathsheba went, lies on the way.
He walks there in the dark, climbs into an empty waggon under a tree, eats his last bread and ham, and falls asleep in the hay. Two hours later he wakes to find it moving. Two men on the front are gossiping about their mistress, a vain woman who looks in the glass to put her night-cap on properly and who can play the piano. Gabriel wonders for a moment whether they mean Bathsheba, then slips out unseen as the waggon nears the village.
A glow in the fields draws him across the ploughed land. A straw-rick is burning, and the farm hands are shouting with no plan until Gabriel tells them to hang a wet cloth across the draught under the wheat-rick. When the only ladder proves burnt, he climbs the sheaves with his crook and sits astride the roof, beating off sparks while Mark Clark bathes his face. A woman on a pony, veiled in wool, asks whose shepherd he is and says she wishes he were hers. Maryann carries her thanks to the foot of the rick. Gabriel, black with smoke, goes to the pony and asks, hat in hand, 'Do you happen to want a shepherd, ma'am?' She lifts the veil, and it is Bathsheba. She says nothing, and he asks again, in a sad, abashed voice: 'Do you want a shepherd, ma'am?'
Coming Up in Chapter 7
Bathsheba steps back into the shade, amused and embarrassed, and says she does want a shepherd. But before she can add more, the villagers declare with one voice that he is the very man. She sends Gabriel to the bailiff and rides off into the dark, and the bailiff then leaves Gabriel without a bed.
