During those same three days, Merry and Pippin had visited any number of towns on the list Frodo had given them, beginning with the ones nearest Gamwich. They heard any number of tales similar to those Frodo and Sam had collected--of gaming and unpaid pub bills, of girls who'd been dallied with--and they diligently made note of it all, since they agreed that Frodo would want them to, although none of it seemed to be what they'd been sent to find. As they went farther afield, the chalk downs gave way to more rugged lands with pockets of marsh and moor. When they found Longditch, a tiny village cleft between two steep hills, they learned that Malbo's uncle Benbo Glossum had died five years ago, but Malbo hadn't been seen in his home village in nearly ten; Benbo had had little money or property to leave, but what he'd had wasn't left to his nephew.
"That's one death Malbo could have nothing to do with," said Merry after they left Longditch and stopped to water their ponies at a roadside well. "But it's the only death we've found connected to him at all. Where shall we go next?"
Pippin, who had been given charge of the list and map, consulted the latter. "There's nowhere else within twenty miles. We'll have to go farther north--practically into the Northfarthing. We could call on your family at Long Cleeve."
"Would you like that, Pip? You could see your girl-friend."
Pippin laughed, delighted that, even though he had promised not to marry without Merry's approval, the threat of his distant cousin Diantha Took still remained on Merry's mind. "That's quite all right," he said. "We write each other often enough. No need for a visit."
"I don't know that I want to ride so far, and most likely on a fool's errand," Merry said. "We've gone from one end of the Shire to the other this week already. It's a wonder the ponies don't fall down exhausted from under us. Here-" He leaned closer to peek over Pippin's shoulder at the map in his hands. "What's that squiggling line along the edge? Is that some drawing of yours, or is it Frodo's?"
"It's Frodo's. I haven't written anything. There's no town in particular circled, but he made a note on his list." Pippin read from this: "'Try the little places you find in this area along the Bounds. There may be something here. Malbo wouldn't talk about it.' That's Frodo all over, isn't it, Merry? He knows we'll find something someplace the dead hobbit never said anything about, but he won't tell us what it is."
"No, but I daresay we'll know when we find it... if we ever do. Well, what do think? Shall we try along the Bounds first, before we go north?"
"It's a shorter way to go in search of nothing," Pippin replied with a grin, and tucked the note and map back into his breast pocket. They climbed back on their ponies and, at the next crossroads, went westward to the Shire's end.
They spent the afternoon going from village to village in the shadow of the Bounds, the raised earthwork embankment that marked the Shire's boundary; beyond lay the Far Downs, which Merry viewed with some interest, since the King proposed granting this empty land to the hobbits for settlement. It wasn't at Overmoor, nor Farthing's Edge, but at a place named Boundenby that they found what they'd been looking for. As Merry had predicted, there was no mistaking it.
"It was all the news here, two years' past," the local bounder, a sturdy middle-aged hobbit who had the job of patrolling several miles of the boundary as well as keeping watch over the homes of the hobbits who lived near it, reported after he'd been treated to a couple of ales. "We never have much news to tell in these parts, but when a girl tosses herself into the mill-pond-! Well, that's a story in itself. A respectable girl too, from a respectable family. Not the sort, you would've thought, to make a fool of herself over a fast-talking lad. Poor miss. They say she was in a full fix--a baby on the way--when he ran off and left her. Now there's some as say the lad didn't know about the baby, and was bound to fly in any case. Her auntie didn't like him playing up to her, you see, and didn't want a scandal and disgrace. And there's some that say the lad was up to mischief the minute he came here, and went off the minute he'd caused it. Malbo Glossum? Now I don't recollect as that was his name, young sirs, though I might say as it sounds familiar-like. Whatever his name, a bad lot he was! Came that spring, he did, a-looking for work, and got himself in all sorts of trouble a-gaming here with the lads at the pub, and a-playing about with girls too, though that one as drowned herself was the worst of it. The rest of `em came off more lucky."
"That certainly sounds like Malbo!" said Pippin.
"What was the girl's name?" asked Merry.
The bounder told them. "And it's odd you ask about it, young sirs, for there was another lad who came a-calling not so long ago, asking just the same as you. Now I think of it, he was asking after this Malbo fellow too!"
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