"She look very grim," he afterward reported to Old Mat.

"Keeps a stiff lip for a little 'un," whispered a lad peeping from behind the jockey's shoulder.

Monkey Brand rounded on him.

"If you'd 'alf her 'eart," he said, "you might be mistook for a man."

For three weeks thereafter Putnam's knew the girl no more; and it seemed that the soul had died out of the place. Monkey Brand moped, and swore the horses moped, too.

"When I goes round my 'orses in the mornin' they look at me like so many bull-oxes askin' to be slaughtered," he said. "Never see sich a sight. Never!"

Old Mat for once was glum. His eye lost its twinkle, and his walk its famous lilt. Mr. Haggard was genuinely sorry for the old man.

"Miss her, Mr. Woodburn?" he asked, stopping the trainer in the village street.

"Miss her!" cried the other. "Mr. Haggard, there's nothing about Hell you can teach me. I knows it all." He waved a significant hand and walked away, his heart in his boots.

Of all the party at Putnam's, Mrs. Woodburn only seemed undisturbed. Unmoved by the gloom of those about her, glum looks, short answers, and the atmosphere of a November fog, she went about her business as before.

Boy's history during those weeks has never been written, and never will be. What she did, said, thought, and suffered during that time—and what others did, said, thought, and suffered because of her—none but the Recording Angel knows. The girl herself never referred to the point; but were reference made to it, she winced like a foal at the touch of the branding-iron.

The episode happily lasted but three weeks.

At the end of that time, on a Saturday morning, one of the lads had ridden the Fly-away filly over to Lewes. There in the High Street the girl swooped on him.

"Get off!" she ordered.

The lad, who feared Miss Boy as he did the devil, obeyed with alacrity.

"Put me up!" Boy ordered.

Again the lad obeyed, and the next thing he was aware of was the swish of the filly's thoroughbred tail as she disappeared round the corner of the street.

An hour later the girl clattered into the yard at Putnam's, the filly in a foam.

Monkey Brand, a chamois leather in his hand, came running out.

"Miss Boy!" he cried.

There was an extraordinary air of suppressed excitement about the girl. She was white-hot and sparkling, yet cold. Indeed, she gave the impression of a sea of emotions battling beneath a floor of ice.

"I've got out," she said.

Panting, but fearless eyed, she went in to face her mother.

Mrs. Woodburn did not seem surprised.

She met her daughter's resistance with disarming quiet.

"Well, Boy," she said, kissing the truant.

"I'm not going back," panted the girl. Her spirit fluttered furiously as that of an escaped bird who fears recapture.

"I'm not going to send you back, my dear," replied the mother.

The girl put her arms about her mother's neck in a moment of rare impulse.

"Oh, mother!" she sighed.

She did not cry: Boy Woodburn was never known to cry. She did not faint. She very rarely fainted. But she trembled through and through.

Mrs. Woodburn paid the necessary fees. The schoolmistress didn't ask to have the girl back. She admitted that she could make nothing of her.

"Stuck her toes in," said Old Mat. "And I don't blame her. Can't see Boy walkin' out two be two, and hand in hand." He shook his head. "Mustn't put a blood filly in the cart, Mar," he said. "She'll only kick the caboodlum to pieces."

Mrs. Woodburn made one more effort to educate her daughter on conventional lines. She introduced a governess to Putnam's. But after the girl had taken her mistress for a ride, the poor woman came to Mrs. Woodburn in tears and asked to leave.

"I can't teach her the irregular verbs on horseback," she said. "And she won't learn any other way. Directly I begin on them, she starts to gallop."

Mrs. Woodburn accepted the governess's notice, and tried nothing further.

"She must go her own way now," she said to Mat.

"It's the right way, Mar," replied the old man comfortably.

"I hope so," answered his wife.

"She can read, and she can write, and she can 'rithmetik,'" continued the other. "What more d'you want with this 'ere education?" He went out, shaking his head. "I sha'n't wep no tear," he said. "That I sha'n't, even if she don't get round them wriggle-regular French worms Mamsel talks of. Roast beef o' old England for me."

Mrs. Woodburn announced her decision to her daughter.

"Thank you, mother," said the girl quietly, and added: "It's no good—not for me."

Mrs. Woodburn eyed her daughter.

"You're a good maid, Boy," she said. "That's the main."

A month later the girl asked her mother if she might help with the lads' Bible Class.

Mrs. Woodburn consented.

A year later, when the girl was sixteen, Mrs. Woodburn asked her daughter if she would take the class alone.

The girl thought it over for a month.

Then she said yes.

In the interval she had passed through a spiritual crisis and made a great renunciation.

She had resolved to put aside the dream that had dominated her inner life for seven years.



CHAPTER XI

Brazil Silver

Boy Woodburn's calling had thrown her from early youth into contact with Eton men.

Indeed, in her experience the world was divided into Eton men—and the Rest. That was what the girl believed; and it was clearly what the Eton men believed, too. Boy herself belonged to the Rest, and did not seem to regret it. The Rest were infinite in number and variety; that was why she liked them so; for the Infinite can know no limitations. It was not so with the other division of the Human Race. Eton men, though almost equally numerous, were limited and stereotyped all to pattern. In the girl's judgment there were three types of them: the Superior Person, who treated her as if she was not; the Bad Ass, to whom she was a poor sort of Joke; and the Incorrigible Creature, who made up to her as if she was a barmaid.

That was her theory. And once the girl had formed a theory as the result of observation, she hated that theory to be upset.

Mr. Silver displeased her because he blew her hypothesis to smithereens on his first appearance; for he was an Eton man, yet clearly he did not come within any of the three known categories.

At first the girl escaped from her intellectual dilemma by a simple and purely feminine wile—she refused to believe that he was an Eton man.

And even when it was proved to her that he had rowed in the Eton boat she remained unconvinced.

"Need you be an Eton man to be in the Eton boat?" she inquired warily.

Mr. Haggard, her informant, thought it probable, but added that he would inquire.

It was not till she had known the young man some six months that she settled the question for herself by asking him point-blank if he had been at Eton.

"I believe so," he answered.

That was his invariable answer to the question when put to him. Now for once he elaborated on it a little.

"Mother wanted me to go," he added. "Father didn't."

"Were you happy there?" asked the girl.

The other's face lit up with the enthusiasm she liked in him so well.

"Was I not?" he said.

* * * * *

Albert Edward took all the credit to himself for the name of Silver Mug. Albert always took all the credit for everything; but really he was by no means so original as he imagined.

In fact, Jim Silver had been Silver Mug when Albert was still a ragged little urchin asking for cigarette pictures from passing toffs outside Brighton Railway Station.

A Lower Boy at Eton had originated the name. It was apt, and it stuck.

Jim Silver in Bromhead's was hugely rich, and he had a great, ugly, honest face. Friends and enemies called him by the name; and he had a good few of both. The former loved him for the qualities the latter hated him for. The cads of the school chaffed surreptitiously about his birth. They said he was the grandson of an agricultural labourer and the son of a bank clerk; but only one of them, more caddish or more courageous than the rest, said so to his face.

"I wouldn't mind if I was," said simple Jim, and was cheered by his loyal little friends, Lord Amersham and others of the right kidney.

His father never came to see him when he was at school.

"I know why," sneered the enemy.

"Why, then?" flared Jim.

"He daren't. Give the show away."

After that the lad gave his enemy a sound hiding, and peace reigned. The bounders might say he was a bounder, but they had to admit that he could give and take punishment with the best.

* * * * *

He left Eton absolutely unspoilt.

A year before the lad quitted the school his father sent for him.

"I didn't want you to go to Eton, Jim," he said. "I'm glad now. Do you want to go on to Oxford?"

The boy thought; and when his reply came it was honest as himself.

"All my friends are going," he said. "I should like it for that reason. But I don't know that I should get much out of it."

"Go for a year," said his father. "See what you make of it. If you're getting any good of it, you can go on. If not, we'll see."

The boy did not leave the room.

His interviews with his father were rare; and there was a question he had long wished to ask.

Now he blurted it out.

"Am I to go into the Bank, father?"

The old man blinked at his son over his spectacles, and then shoved back his chair.

"What d'you want?" he asked.

"I should like the Army, or to farm," replied the son.

Mr. Silver put down his paper.

It was some time before he answered.

"The Bank's my life," he said at last. "You're my son. You may choose for yourself." He drummed with his fingers on the table; and Jim left the room.

* * * * *

When the half-breeds, as Lord Amersham called them, jeered at Silver as the son of an agricultural labourer there was a modicum of truth at the back of the lie.

The boy came of a long line of yeoman-farmers in Leicestershire, famous for generations for their stock and their integrity.

Jim Silver's grandfather was the last of that line. He was a big man and big farmer, husbanding his wide acres wisely and well, breeding good stock, enjoying his day's hunting, but not making too much of it, touching his hat to his landlord, a familiar and imposing figure at all the Agricultural Shows in the Midlands.

His only son George was in his father's opinion a sport. Certainly he was no true Silver: that was obvious from his earliest years. He cared nothing for a horse, was a shamefully bad judge of a beast, had no feeling for the fields, never knew the real poetic thrill at the sight and smell of a yard knee deep in muck, and hated mud and rain.

"More of a scholar," said his father regretfully. "All for books and studyin'."

Mr. Silver, wise as are those who come into contact with Nature at first hand, did not interfere with his son's queer predilections or attempt to stay his development on the lines of instinctive preference, aiding the boy indeed in every way to make the most of himself on the path he had chosen.

Thus he sent him to the Grammar School at Leicester. The boy went joyfully: for he was very modern. The town, the books, the people, the streets, the hum of business, the opening gates of knowledge, pleased and contented his insatiable young spirit. The father had the reward of his daring. George did famously and became in time Captain of the School. The farmer attended prize-giving, and watched his son march up to the table time after time amidst the cheers of his school-fellows.

"George has got the red rosette again, Mr. Silver," smiled the Headmaster.

"So I see," replied the farmer. "But the showring's one thing, work's another." And when pressed to send his son on to a University he refused.

"He'll get an exhibition," urged the Headmaster.

The father was not impressed.

"Moderation in all things," he said, shaking a shrewd head. "Edication as well. He's stood out long enough. Time he began to 'arn."

The Headmaster's arguments were of no avail.

"I'd got all the schooling I needed by then I was eleven. He's had till he's eighteen. If it's to be of any good to him it'll be good now," said Mr. Silver.

To his surprise and secret pleasure his son backed him. He didn't want to go to a University.

"It's not much use unless you're a classic," the boy said. "And I'm a mathematician."

Besides he had his own clear-cut views of what he wished to do. And those views were very strange. He wanted to go into a Bank.

"Bank!" cried the amazed father. "Set at a counter all day and calcalate sums?"

The boy grinned behind his spectacles in his foolish way.

"That's about it," he said.

"Well, I never!" cried the father.

But true to his principles he let his son go his own way. Indeed, he helped him to a clerkship in the great Midland and Birmingham Joint Stock Bank, of which his landlord, Sir Evelyn Merry, was chairman.

"Glad to get him," said the old baronet. "If he's half as good a man as his father he'll do well."

The boy started at a local branch, and in a year was transferred to the central office at Birmingham.

There he spent his spare time attending evening classes. At the end of a year he held a certificate, was entitled to put certain letters after his name, and had written an article on bullion which appeared in the Banker's Magazine and was translated into German.

By the time he was thirty he was a manager, and ten years later he was one of the managing directors of the second biggest Joint Stock Bank in the richest country in the world.

And he did not stop there. George Silver was a financier in the great style, and a superlatively honest one. He had the initiative, the knowledge, and above all the judgment that made some men call him the Napoleon of Threadneedle Street. At forty-five he launched the Union Bank of Brazil and Uruguay; and to that colossal undertaking he devoted the last twenty-five years of his strenuous and successful life.

In the City he was known thereafter as Brazil Silver.

The Bank was his passion and his life.

When at fifty, to the astonishment of many, he married, the City merely said:

"He must have an heir to carry on the Bank."

Mrs. Silver was a semi-aristocratic woman of limited intelligence, suppressed ambition, and sound limbs. It was the latter characteristic which won her a husband. He was not such a bad judge of make and shape as his father would have had the world believe; and as usual Brazil Silver's judgment proved good. In the appointed time his wife fulfilled her function, and gave him the son he asked of her.



CHAPTER XII

The Eton Man

Jim Silver grew up neither his father's son nor his mother's.

"He's a throw-back—to his grandfather," said old Sir Evelyn.

And in fact from the first the lad's soul hankered after the broad lands of Leicestershire rather than the counting-house in Threadneedle Street.

His happiest days were spent as a child on his grand-dad's farm, amid the great horses, and sweet-breathed kine, and golden stacks.

"Back to the land," as his grandfather was fond of saying, was the child's unspoken motto.

The old man and his sturdy grandchild were rare intimates, and never so happy as when wandering together about the yards and farm-buildings and pastures, the child, silent and absorbed, as he clutched his grand-dad's big brown finger.

The pair did not talk much: they were too content. But there was one often-repeated conversation which took place between them as they strolled.

"What goin' to be when you grows up, Jim?"

"Farmer."

"What shall ye breed?"

"Shire-'osses."

The child came back always from those prolonged visits with the sun on his cheeks, the strength in his limbs, and Leicestershire broad upon his tongue; and he never understood why his mother cut his visits short on every imaginable pretext.

At Eton the lad's friends were almost all drawn from the families in whose blood, after generations of possession, the land and its belongings had become a real if somewhat perverted passion. They would sit on into the twilight in each other's studies and ramble on interminably and with the exaggerated wisdom of seventeen about the subject nearest to their youthful hearts.

Sometimes Mr. Bromhead would look in, grim and gray behind his spectacles.

"Talking horses as usual, Jim, I suppose," he would say.

"And dog, sir," corrected young Amersham.

"With an occasional shorthorn chucked in to tip the scale," added old Sir Evelyn's fair grandson.

* * * * *

When Brazil Silver died, the year his son was the heavy-weight in the Oxford boat, he left a will which was in accordance with his life.

Every penny he had—and he had a good many, as the Chancellor of the Exchequer remarked in the House of Commons—was tied up in the Bank, and to remain there.

It was all left to his son. "I can trust him to see to his mother," ran the will, written on half a sheet of paper, "and to any dependents. Charities I loathe."

The son was free to save anything he liked from his vast income, but the capital must stay in the Bank.

The old man made no condition that Jim should enter the Bank, and expressed no wish to that effect. His friends, therefore, speculated what Jim would do.

They might have spared themselves the trouble. He left Oxford, in spite of the protests of the Captain of the boat, who spent a vain but hectic week pointing out to the apostate the path of duty, which was also the path of glory, and went into the Bank.

His reasoning, as always, was simple and to the point.

"The Bank was my father's show," he said. "He made it, and left it to me to carry on. And I shall—to the best of my ability."

With that capacity for dogged grind which distinguished him, he tried to render himself efficient, working early and late like any clerk.

It was a well-nigh hopeless task. Jim Silver's head was sound if slow; but he had no aptitude for figures.

"I'm worth two pound a week in the open market," he told his old house-master. "And I'm supposed to be bossing—that." And he brandished the latest report of the Bank of which he was nominal chairman.

Notwithstanding obvious differences in many ways, Jim inherited some of his father's characteristics.

Brazil Silver, in spite of his success, had always remained in his personal life the simple farmer's son. Indeed, it was said in the City that he never owned a dress-suit, and that when he had to attend City banquets he hired his butler's.

When he died he left behind him none of the usual encumbrances. Original in his private life as in finance, he had steadfastly refused to go the way of the world. He had never bought a great place in the country or a big house in town. He had never taken a Scotch moor or a river in Norway. In London he had a plain but perfectly appointed flat; and sometimes in the summer he took a house on the river or at St. Helen's.

In these respects Jim followed faithfully in the steps of his father.

He kept on the flat in town, worked in the City all the day, and spent much time of evenings at the Eton Mission in Hackney Wick.

One small extravagance he attempted: he tried to buy from old Sir Evelyn the farm on which his fathers had lived and died for generations.

The old gentleman, who would sooner have parted from his soul than from an acre of his inheritance, refused to sell.

"I suppose the boy'll cut up rough now," grumbled the old baronet, who was fond of Jim.

"Oh, no, he won't, grandfather," replied his grandson. "He's awfully decent."

"We shall see," mumbled the old man; but he had shortly to admit that Billy was right.

Jim Silver, thwarted in his desire to acquire his grandfather's farm, rented a little hunting-box near by instead. There he kept his weight-carriers, and there during the hunting season he spent his week-ends and occasional holidays.

Since the days when he walked his grand-dad's farm as a child, his ambitions had changed in degree but not in kind. Then he had proposed to devote his life to breeding shire-horses. Now he meant, when once he had mastered his job, to devote his leisure to owning and breeding 'chasers.

Some time elapsed after his father's death before he let himself go in this respect. His sensitive conscience and high sense of duty gave him an uneasy mind in the matter. His father had disapproved of horses, or rather had been afraid of the Turf and its consequences.

It was a while before the son could assuage his qualms and feel himself free to go forward in the prosecution of his desire.

His old house-master, still his father-confessor in spiritual distresses, finally dispelled the young man's doubts and launched him on his destined way.

"Be yourself," he said, "as your father was before you. He wouldn't farm—because he hadn't got it in him. What he had in him was banking. So like a wise man he banked. You've got it in you to breed steeplechase horses. So breed them. Only—breed them better than any man ever bred them before."

The young man's mind once finally resolved, nothing could stop him. And it was in the pursuit of his desire that he first came across Mat Woodburn.

The old man and the young took to each other from the first. Indeed, there was much in common between the two. Both were simple of heart, children of nature, caring little for the world, and both believed with passionate conviction that an English thoroughbred was the crown and glory of God's creatures.

"HE didn't make no mistake that time," the old man was fond of saying with emphasis, to the amusement of Mr. Haggard and the annoyance of his wife.



CHAPTER XIII

Boy in Her Eyrie

In the corner of the yard at Putnam's was Billy Bluff's kennel. Above the kennel, a broad ladder, much haunted by Maudie, the free, who loved to sit on it and tantalize with her airs of liberty Billy, the prisoner on his chain, led to the loft above the stable.

It was a very ordinary loft in the roof, dusty, dark, with hay piled in one corner, a chaff-cutter, and trap-doors in the floor, through which the forage was thrust down into the mangers of the horses below.

At the end of the loft was a wooden partition. Behind the partition was the girl's room.

She slept and lived up there over the stable at her own desire. It was less like being in a house: the girl felt herself her own mistress as she did not under the maternal roof; and most of all she was near the horses.

"I keep two watch-dogs at my place," Old Mat would say. "Billy Bluff a-low and my little gal a-loft."

Boy loved to go to sleep to the sound of the rhythmical munching of the horses beneath, and to wake to the noise of them blowing their noses in the dawn. Never a mouse moved in the stable at night but she was aware of it. And when a horse was training for a big event barely a night passed but in the small hours a white, bare-footed figure issued from the partition and came swiftly along the loft, disturbing rats and bats as she came, to lift a trap-door and look down with guardian eye on the hope of the stable dreaming unconsciously beneath.

In her solitary eyrie up there the girl learned a great deal.

Elsie Haggard, the vicar's daughter, or, as Mrs. Woodburn would say, with that touch of satire characteristic of her, the daughter of the vicar's wife, who was two years older than Boy, and at college, once asked her if she wasn't afraid.

"Afraid!" asked the girl. "What of?"

"I don't know," answered Elsie. "It's so far from everybody."

"I like being alone," replied the girl. "And there are the horses."

Elsie Haggard shared her mother's concern for Boy Woodburn's soul.

"And Someone Else," she said.

"Yes," replied the girl simply, almost brutally. "There's the Lord."

Elsie Haggard looked at her sharply, suspecting her of flippancy.

Nothing clearly was further from the girl's mind. Her face was unusually soft, almost dreamy.

"Wherever there are horses and dogs and creatures He is, don't you think?" she said, quite unconscious that she was quoting inexactly a recently discovered saying dear to Mr. Haggard.

"Ye-es," answered Elsie dubiously. "Of course, they've got no souls."

The dreamer vanished.

"I don't agree," flashed the girl.

Elsie mounted on her high horse.

"Perhaps you know more about it than my father," she said.

"He doesn't agree, either," retorted the girl mercilessly.

She was right; and Elsie knew it. The vicar's daughter made a lame recovery. Theology was always her father's weak point.

"Or mother," she said.

"Your mother doesn't know much about a horse," said the girl slowly.

"She knows about their souls," cried Elsie triumphantly.

"She can't if they haven't got them," retorted Boy, with the brutal logic that distinguished her.

* * * * *

Boy Woodburn's room in the loft was characteristic of its owner.

Mr. Haggard said it was full of light and little else.

It was the room of a boy, not of a girl; of a soldier, and not an artist.

The girl in truth had the limitations of her qualities. She was so near to Nature that she had no need for Art, and no understanding of it.

The room knew neither carpet, curtain, nor blind. The sun, the wind, and not seldom the rain and snow were free of it. A small collapsible camp-bed, a copper basin and jug, an old chest, a corner cupboard—these constituted the furniture. The walls were whitewashed. Three of them knew no pictures. On one was her hunting-crop, a cutting-whip, and a pair of spurs; beneath them a boot-jack and three pairs of soft riding-boots in various stages of wear. In the corner stood a tandem-whip.

Above the mantelpiece was one of the plates in which Cannibal had run the National, framing a photograph of the ugliest horse that ever won at Aintree—and the biggest, to judge from the size of the plate. Beneath it was a picture of the Good Shepherd and the Lost Sheep, and a church almanac. On the mantelpiece were the photographs of her mother, her father, Monkey Brand in the Putnam colours, and the Passion Play at Oberammergau; while pinned above the clock was the one poem, other than certain hymns and psalms, that Boy knew by heart.

It was called Two on the Downs, and had been written by Mr. Haggard, when in the first vigour of youth he had come to take up his ministry in Cuckmere thirty years since:

Two on the Downs

_Climb ho! So we go Up the hill to the sky, Through the lane where the apple-blossoms blow And the lovers pass us by.

Let them laugh at you and me, Let them if they dare! They're almost as bad maybe— What do we care?

Halt ho! On the brow!— O, the world is wide! And the wind and the waters blow and flow In the sun on every side.

By the dew-pond windy-dark, Take a gusty breath; The gorse in glory, The sunshine hoary Upon the sea beneath._

_Swing ho! Bowing go, Breathless with laughter and song, The wind in her wilful hair a-blow, Swinging along, along.

She and I, girl and boy, Merrily arm in arm, The lark above us, And God to love us, And keep our hearts from harm.

Sing ho! So we go, Over Downs that are surging green, Under the sky and the seas that lie Silvery-strewn between_.

One brilliant morning in early June, some two months after she had brought the gypsy's mare back to Putnam's on the evening of the Polefax Meeting, Boy rose early and stood humming the lines as she dressed, to a simple little tune she had composed for them.

The words were in harmony with her mood and with the morning. In part they inspired, in part they determined her. As she began the song Boy was wondering whether she should begin to bathe. Her mind had resolved itself without effort as she ended.

There had been a week of summer; the tide would be high, and only a day or two back a coastguard at the Gap had told her that the water was warming fast.

She went to the window and looked out over the vast green sweep of the Paddock Close running away up the gorse-crowned hillside that rose like a rampart at the back.

It was early. The sun had risen, but the mist lay white as yet in the hollows and hung about the dripping trees. Earth and sky and sea called her.

The girl slipped into her riding-boots, put her jersey on, and over it her worn long-skirted coat, twisted her bathing gown and cap inside her towel, and walked across the loft, the old boards shaking beneath her swift feet.

At the top of the ladder she paused a moment and looked down.

The fan-tails strutted in the yard; Maudie licked herself on the ladder just out of the reach of Billy Bluff, who, tossing on his chain, greeted the girl with a volley of yelps, yaps, howls of triumph, petition, expectation and joy.

Maudie, less pleased, rose coldly, and descended the ladder. She knew by experience what to expect when that slight figure came tripping down the ladder.

The Monster-without-Manners would be let loose upon Society. The Monster-without-Manners was kept in his place all through the night by a simple but admirable expedient which Maudie did not profess to understand. As the sun peeped over the wall, Two-legs appeared at the top of the ladder, and peace departed from the earth till the sun went down again, when the Monster-without-Manners resumed his proper place upon the chain. He did not know how to treat a lady, and was impervious to scratches that would have taught one less shaggy. He was rough, and no gentleman.

Maudie herself had the manners of an aristocrat of fiction. She walked through life, curling a contumelious lip, unshaken by the passions, aloof from the struggles, high above the emotions that stir and beset the creatures of the dust. In Maudie's estimation Billy Bluff was a bounder. Certainly he bounded, and like most bounders he conceived of himself quite falsely as a funny fellow.

Brooding on her grievances, Maudie strolled thoughtfully across the yard, one eye always on her enemy, timing herself to be on the top of the wall just a second before the M.-w.-M. was free to bound.

"Shut up, you ass!" said the girl as she released the bob-tail.

He was away with a roar, scattering the fan-tails, as he launched on his way to exchange jibes with Maudie, languid, secure, and insolent on the top of the wall.

The girl went to the saddle-room, took down her saddle and bridle, and turned into the stable.

For once she was not the first.

Monkey Brand was before her, standing at the head of a now familiar chestnut pony, waiting, saddled, on the pillar-reins.

"Is Mr. Silver down?" the girl asked, surprised.

"Yes, Miss. Came late last night. Down for the week-end, I believe. He's goin' for a stretch before he looks at the 'orses," the little jockey informed her. "They're goin' to gallop Make-Way-There this morning."

"Are they?" said the girl sharply.

It was rarely anything took place in the stable without her knowledge. And Make-Way-There, who was one of Mr. Silver's horses, was to run at the Paris Meeting two weeks hence.

The girl, to hide her resentment, placed her hand on the pony's neck, hard as marble beneath a skin that was soft to the touch as a mole's.

"Ain't he a little clinker?" said Monkey Brand in hushed voice. "They say Mr. Silver refused L600 for him at Hurlingham. And he took champion at the Poly Pony Show."

The girl's hand travelled down the pony's neck with firm, strong, rhythmical stroke.

"Heart of Oak!" she purred affectionately.

Ragamuffin, the old roan pony in the next stall, began to move, restless and irritable.

"He's jealous, is old Rags," smiled Monkey.

The girl went to the roan.

"Now, then, old man," she said. "Old friends first."

She saddled him and led him out into the yard.

Attached to the d's of the light saddle was a string forage bag such as cavalry soldiers carry. Into it she stuffed her towel and all that it contained.

Monkey Brand held the pony's head as she mounted.

"How's the old mare?" she asked, gathering her reins.

"Four Pound?" queried the jockey. "I didn't see her this morning as I come along, Miss. She must ha' been layin' behind the trees. Another week, I should say."

"William!" called the girl, and rode through the gate into the Paddock Close.

* * * * *

Since the Polefax Meeting Silver had come and gone continually. His week-ends he spent frequently at Putnam's, returning to London by the first train on Monday morning.

"He don't like the Bank, and I don't blame him," said Old Mat. "I reck'n he'd like to be all the while in the saddle on the Downs."

"Why does he stick to the Bank?" the girl blurted out.

It was the only question she had ever put about Mr. Silver.

"Because he's got to, my dear," replied the sagacious old man. "If he don't stick to the Bank, the Bank won't stick to him, I guess."

In those months the girl had learned a good deal about Mr. Silver. He was different from the other men she knew. She had felt that at once on meeting him. She was shy with him and short; and it was rare for her to be shy with men. Indeed, in her heart she knew that she was almost afraid of him. And she had never known herself afraid of a man before. That made her angry with him, though it was no fault of his.

Then she had resented the unconscious part he had played in the affair of the wood. She was sure he was laughing at her. And that good, plain, smileless face of his, and the very fact that he never referred to the incident, only made her the more suspicious.

His awkward big-dog attempts at friendliness had been repulsed. She played the Maudie to his Billy Bluff, and all would have been well but that he refused to get back upon her by bounding. Instead, he apparently had come to the conclusion that she disliked him, and had withdrawn.

That made her angrier still.

Now she had not even known that he was coming down last night. And worst and most unforgivable of all, she had not been told that Make-Way-There was to be galloped that morning.

Ragamuffin, the roan, was surprised when his mistress picked him up immediately she entered the Paddock Close and pushed him into a canter.



CHAPTER XIV

Old Man Badger

Ragamuffin was old, but his heart was good. Directly his mistress asked him he snatched for his head and went away smooth and swift as a racing boat.

Boy pulled off to the right and made for the clump of trees half-way up the hill.

The gypsy's mare was grazing by herself behind them.

The girl steadied to a halt and watched her critically, calling Billy Bluff to heel.

She didn't want the boisterous young dog to worry the old mare just now, and it was clear that Four Pound didn't want it either.

As Billy Bluff skirmished about, she put back her ears and lowered her head with an irritable motion; but she was far too lazy to make the charge she threatened.

The girl's inspection made, and conclusions drawn, she pursued her way up the hill, popped her pony over the low post and rails which fenced off the Paddock Close from the untamed Downs, and walked leisurely over the brow, the gorse warm and smelling in the sun.

Beneath her a valley stretched away to the sea. There the cliff rose steeply to a lighthouse, standing on a bare summit; dipped, and rose again. In the hollow between the two hills a white coastguard station sentinelled the Gap, across which the line of the sea stretched like a silver wire.

Nobody was yet astir save a ploughman driving a team of slow-moving oxen to the fields. To Boy the beauty of the early morning lay in the fact that she had the hills and heavens and seas to herself, and could enjoy them in her own way without thought of interference from a world too frivolous, too feverish, and above all too loud, to understand.

As she rode along, her young face was uplifted to catch the rivulets of song that came pouring down on her from the blue.

She dropped down the hill, disturbing the rabbits busy in the dew, and bursting through the cables of gossamer that tried to stay her. A kestrel hovered over the gorse, and she marked a badger on the hillside shuffling home before Man and his Dogs began the old rowdy-dowdy game once more.

Happily Billy Bluff, who was always too much absorbed in the object immediately beneath his nose to take long views, did not see him. And the girl was glad. Sport, in so far as it meant killing the creatures of the wilderness for pleasure, made no appeal to her. She had no desire whatever to see a fight between the badger and Billy Bluff. The badger had in her judgment many qualities. She respected his desire for freedom and determination to go his own way. Also if the pair fought, the girl shrewdly suspected that Billy Bluff, big though he was, and bold as a lion, might be worsted. For Billy, after all, was decadent according to the standards of the wilderness.

He lived on a chain, protected by the police, and fed by hand. Every man was not his enemy, and he had not to hunt for each meal or go without. Billy Bluff, however fine a fellow he might be in his own eyes, was a poor creature in that of Warrior Badger. Civilization, if it had given him much of which the badger recked nothing, had also taken her toll of him.

Thinking vaguely thus, the girl once down the hill caught hold of Ragamuffin and spun him along the valley between the hills till she came to the coastguard station, straggling like a flock of sheep across the Gap.

At the mouth of the Gap was a familiar post.

She slipped Ragamuffin's rein over it, and ran down the steep, uneven way through the chalk cliff, her bob-tail baying at her side.

Right athwart the Gap, peering into it, shining-eyed and splendid, lay the sea, calling her.

"I'm coming!" her heart answered with a thrill, and she swooped toward it with a whoop and widespread arms.

Her feet crashed into the jolly shouting shingle, and she ploughed her way through it, to the rocks under the cliff which made her bathing tent.

The tide was brimming and beautiful. It came welling up, curled and fell with a soft, delicious swish on the answering beach.

Calm and full, twinkling still through faint mists, its shining surface was ruffled faintly by a light-footed breeze.

Swift as a bird the girl, blue-clad now, came rushing out from her hiding-place, her fair hair bunched in a cap, the sea in her nostrils, and exaltation in her heart.

This surely was heaven!

A moment she hovered on the brink, testing the waters with a tentative foot.

Then with a sigh of content she trusted herself to the deep. It closed about her like the arms of a friend.

She had not bathed since November, and it seemed to her the ocean welcomed her, clinging to her, lifting her, loving her, holding her close.

She buried her face in it, rose dripping, shaking the water off her eyes and face and hair, and swam out to sea with long and steady strokes.

She did not shout, she did not splash, she did not play the fool, and did not want to; rejoicing deeply in the quiet of her great friend, heart to heart and flesh to flesh, while the waters made music all about her.

The first bath was for her a kind of sacrament. She drew from it the deep and tranquil exaltation that she supposed Elsie Haggard drew from Communion.

Fifty yards out to sea she turned and trod water.

Billy Bluff, the old ass, was fussing about on the edge of the tide, barking at her.

"William!" called the head on the water. "Come on!"

Billy fiddled and flirted and could not bring himself to make the plunge.

Boy watched him with amused resentment. It was his domesticity which was his undoing. Old Man Badger on the hillside would never have dillied or dallied like that.

"Come on!" she ordered deeply. "Or I'll come and lug you in."

Billy marked the imperious note in his young mistress's voice. He ran this way and that, excused himself, pranced, whined, whimpered, yapped, barked, tasted the water and didn't like it, tried a dip, and withdrew, and finally made the effort and shoved off.

He swam rather low. His long, black back lay along the shining surface, his hair floating like seaweed on either side of him, while he left a little eddying wake behind him, as he pushed swiftly toward the girl.

As he came nearer she splashed him and he barked joyfully. He made for her, to paw and sprawl upon her. She evaded him.

Awhile girl and dog sported together in the deep, happy and laughing as two children.

Then they raced for the shore. He reached it first and, a caricature of his usual shaggy self, ran up toward her clothes, flinging off showers of drops.

"Keep off, creature!" she ordered, her big voice emerging strangely from her wisp of dripping figure, as she walked delicately up the shingle.



CHAPTER XV

The Three J's

Old Mat was fond of telling his intimates that Monkey Brand was fly.

"He do love his little bit o' roguey-poguey," he would say with a twinkle. And it was the old man's opinion, often expressed, that weight for age Monkey would beat the crooks at their own game every time.

And when he set the little jockey to snout about and rout out the business of Joses, he knew he was setting his head-lad a task after his heart.

Monkey Brand had gone to work indeed with the tenacity and the tact that distinguished him. Once on a line, he hunted it with the ruthlessness of a stoat. But this time, it seemed, he had met his match. If Monkey was cunning as a fox, Joses was wary as a lynx.

The fat man watched the other's manoeuvres with eyes that did not disguise their amusement. He was always ready for a chat in which Monkey liberally be-larded him with sirs, was obsequious and deferential; but he would never cross the door of a public-house, and never, as the little man reported, "let on."

It was by a chance the seeker came on the clue at last.

One evening he marked his victim down in the Post Office and followed him quietly. Joses was at the counter sending a telegram. The postmistress, unable to read the code-address, had asked for enlightenment.

"Spavin," Joses said; and the secret was out. For all the world knew that Spavin was the code-address of the shady and successful trainer at Dewhurst on the Arunvale side of the Downs.

"Who said Jaggers?" came a little voice at his elbow.

The fat man turned to find the jockey close behind him.

"I did," he answered brazenly.

Monkey smiled the smile of a bottle-fed cherub.

"'Ow's my ole pal Chukkers?" he piped.

Joses grinned.

"Just back," he said.

"So I hears," answered the other. "Been teachin' 'em tricks in Horsetralia, ain't he? Went there by way of God's Country, same as per usual, huntin' fer black diamonds. What's he brought back this journey?—a pink-eyed broncho from the Prairees bought for ten cents from a Texas cow-puncher, and guaranteed to show the English plugs the way to move."

Joses wagged a shaggy head. If to retain a sense of humour is still to possess something of a soul, then the fat man was not entirely lost.

"You love Chukkers, don't you?" he said.

"Don't I love all dagos?" asked Monkey. "Sich a pretty little way with 'em they got. Same as a baa-lamb in the meadow 'mong the buttercups."

"Then now I'll tell you something for yourself," said Joses. "He loves all the English—owners, jockeys, and crowd. But he loves you best."

"Never!" cried Monkey, greatly moved. "Then I'm the man what won the Greaser's Heart. It's too much."

A few further inquiries, made by Mat, put the thing beyond question.

Joses was watcher for Jaggers, who trained for Ikey Aaronsohnn, for whom Chukkers rode.

In England, Australia, and the Americas, the three were always spoken of together as the Three J's—Jaggers, the Jockey, and the Jew. Wherever horses raced their fame was great, and amongst the English at least it was evil and ominous.

"Rogues and rasqueals!" Old Mat would say with one of his deep sighs. "But whatebber should we do without 'em?"

For Putnam's the Three J's had always possessed a particular interest.

Their stable was at Dewhurst, just behind Arunvah, at the other end of the South Downs. And Dewhurst had been for twenty years the centre of that campaign to lower the colours of the English thoroughbred, which Ikey Aaronsohnn had embarked upon in his unforgotten youth.

The little Levantine hailed from New York, Hamburg, and London—especially the first two. A cosmopolitan banker, and genial rascal, he had, even in England, a host of friends, and deserved them. A man of ideals, and extremely tenacious, objets d'art and steeplechase horses had been his twin passions from his childhood. He collected both with a judgment amounting to genius. And there were few experts in either kind who were not prepared to acknowledge him their master.

The day when Ikey, then young, sure of himself, and enthusiastic, had been called a "bloody little German Jew" in the Paddock at Liverpool by a noble English sportsman, as he led his first winner home, had been forgotten by others but not by him. And when a year later the little man stood for White's Club, on the strength of winning the International, and was black-balled, the die was cast.

There was no doubt that Ikey had his qualities. Whether he was your friend or your enemy, he never forgot you; and he gave you cause to remember him. His memory was long; his temper not to be ruffled; his humour, in victory and defeat, invincible; his purse unfathomable. He was never known to be angry, impetuous, or bitter. And he never deviated from his aim. That aim, as he once told the New York Yacht Club, in words that were trumpeted across the world, was "to lick the English thoroughbred on his own ground, at his own game, all the time, and every way."

What P. Forilland had done for a previous generation of Americans, when Iroquois snatched the Blue Riband of the Turf from the English and bore it across the Atlantic, Ikey meant to do some day at Liverpool.

"We've wopped 'em once on the flat, and we'll wop 'em yet across country," he once said at Meadow Brook.

It was with this end in view that Chukkers, then a kid-jockey from the West, had crossed the ocean in Ikey's train, and first carried to victory the star-spangled jacket which for the past twenty years had caused such heart-burnings among the English owners, trainers, and jockeys, and such mingled enthusiasm and indignation in the uncertain-tempered English crowd.

In that twenty years Ikey, if he had never yet achieved his end and won the Grand National with an other-than-English horse, had given the Englishmen such a shaking as they had never experienced before.

All over the world, wherever horses were bred, from the Punjab to the Pampas, and from the Tenterfield Ranges to Old Virginia, he had his scouts and his stud-farms. It was said that if a wall-eyed pack mule, carrying quartz in the Nevadas, showed a disposition to gallop and jump he would be in Ikey's stable in a fortnight, and, if he made good, at Dewhurst within six months.

It was, of course, with the Walers that the little Levantine came nearest his desire. He imported them into the old country on a scale never before dreamed of. Some of them proved themselves great horses, the equals of the best the English could bring against them: all were good. And it was only by an act of God, as the enemy English declared, that Boomerang, the king of them, had failed to win the National and consummate his owner's long-delayed end.

But Ikey, that merry little rogue, the cup of victory dashed from his lips, never for a moment lost heart.

As he truly said,

"If I haven't yet found the horse, I've found the jockey that can beat their best."

And in time he would find the horse, too.

He believed that. So did America.



CHAPTER XVI

The Fat Man

It was notorious that the Three J's (or, to be more exact, Ikey) not only had their scouts out all over the world, seeking what Monkey Brand called "black diamonds," but that they had their eyes everywhere in the Old Country, watching enemy stables. And Joses was the Eye that watched all the stables on the South Downs from Beachy Head to the Rother—and Putnam's most of all.

When tackled further on the subject by Monkey Brand, the tout admitted the fact without demur and even with pride.

"Yes," he swaggered. "I'm a commission agent. A very honourable profession, too."

"Not ha hartist at all?" queried Monkey, chewing his quid.

Joses laughed and spread himself, throwing back his gingery curls.

"I was at Oxford," he said, "and I've all the tastes of a gentleman. Art and poetry are my specialties—when my professional duties allow me time."

The little dark jockey turned in his lips, eyeing the other with bland interest.

"'Ark to him!" he said. "Don't he talk. Learned the patter at Oxford College, I expect." He turned on his lame leg. "Anyway, we know now where we are, Mr. Moses Joses."

* * * * *

After the incident in the Post Office Joses dropped his easel and went about with field-glasses unashamed. To give him his due, there were few better watchers in the trade. A man of education and great natural ability, he was quite unscrupulous as to how he achieved his end.

As Chukkers said of him:

"He gets there. Never mind how."

Joses indeed was out early and late, and he was horribly alert. Nobody knew when and where his fat body and brown face might not be turning up.

"Crawls around like a great red slug," said Old Mat; and it was seldom a horse did a big gallop but the fat man was there to see.

The morning Boy went for her first dip he was at the lighthouse on the cliff above the Gap. Whether he had slept there, or risen with the dawn, it was hard to say. The lighthouse marked the highest point in the neighbourhood, and was therefore useful for the watcher's purpose. From there with his glasses he could sweep The Mare's Back and The Giant's Shoulder and neighbouring ridges on which the horses of the stables in the district galloped.

The Paris Meeting was the next big event; and Ikey Aaronsohnn's horse Jackaroo—the waler Chukkers had just brought back with him from the other side—was to make his first appearance at it. There was only one English horse of which the Dewhurst stable had not the measure, and that was the Putnam mare Make-Way-There. Jaggers, in that curt, sub-acid way of his, had instructed Joses to report on her form, and "to make no mistake about it."

The tout had touched his hat and answered:

"Very good, sir."

Now it was well known that a man had to be up very early in every sense if he wanted to keep an eye on a Putnam horse. Mat Woodburn might be old, but he was by no means sleepy; and Joses could not afford to blunder.

Last night two telegrams had come to Cuckmere: one was to Silver from Chukkers, and the other to Joses from Jaggers. They had been written at the same moment by the same man. And the one to Joses ran—

Make-Way-There to-morrow.

Standing under the lee of the lighthouse, seeing while himself unseen, the tout kept his eyes to his glasses.

Little escaped him. He saw the badger moving on the hillside, and watched the girl on her pony come over the crest from Putnam's, a slight figure black against the sky. He followed her as she dropped down the hill and scampered along the valley, marked her hang her pony's rein over the post, and disappear down the gap.

Joses closed his glasses. His face became a dirty red. It was as though the mud in him had been stirred by an obscene hand.

In a moment a slight figure in a blue gown appeared from under the cliff and entered the sea.

Shoving his glasses into his pocket, Joses began to shuffle down the hill toward the Gap. The kittiwakes flashed and swept and hovered in the blue above him. The sea shone and twinkled far beneath. A great, brown-sailed barge lolled lazily by under the cliff.

He was unaware of them, shuffling over the short, sweet-scented turf like some great human hog, snorting as he went, his eyes on that little bobbing black dot on the face of the waters beneath him.

There was no cover. The turf lifted its calm face to the naked sky. And he crept along, crouching in himself, as though fearing detection from on high.

The girl was in and out of the water again with astonishing speed. By the time the tout had reached the foot of the hill she was under the cliff again and out of sight. He peered over stealthily. There was nothing much to see but a dark blue gown spread on a rock to dry, and behind the rock the bob of a bathing cap.

The Gap was three hundred yards away. A sleepy coastguard had emerged from one of the cottages and was washing at a tub of rain water.

Where Joses stood the cliff was low, scarcely twenty feet above the beach, and was not entirely precipitous.

He pocketed his glasses and scrambled panting down to the beach.

Then he began to stalk the rock decorated with the bathing gown; and he did not look pretty.

His hot red face perspired, and he panted as he crawled.

It is hard to say what was in his heart, and better perhaps not to inquire.

One thing only stood out clearly in his mind.

He owed that girl behind the rock two; and Joses rarely forgot to pay his debts.

There was first the affair of the wood. He suffered pain and inconvenience still as the result of that incident, and the doctor told him that he might expect to continue to suffer it. And what mattered more, there was the sense of humiliation and the disfigurement. His nose, never a thing of beauty, was now a standing offence. The children ran from it, and Joses was genuinely fond of children. The little daughter of Mrs. Boam, his landlady, Jenny, once his friend, had now deserted him.

And there was the matter of the young man, which he found it even harder to forgive. That young man was Silver, and he was a Mug. A mug was made to be drained; and Joses had dreamed that to him would fall the draining of this singularly fine specimen of his class. His attachment to the firm of the Three J's, based largely on fear, was not such but that he would break it at any moment could he do so with security and profit.

He had known all about Silver long before he had turned up at Putnam's; it was part of his business to know about such young men. Indeed, he had made an abortive, determined, and characteristically tortuous attempt to sweep the young man and his horses into Jaggers's capacious net.

Silver indeed had hesitated awhile between the two stables. Then he had met Jaggers, and had decided at once—against Dewhurst. When the game was finally lost, and it was known that Putnam's had come out top again in the struggle that had lasted between the two stables for thirty years, the tout changed his method but never lost sight of his ideal; yearning over the rich young man as a mother yearns over a child.

His dreams had been shattered finally in the wood a month back, and for that debacle the girl behind the rock must be held responsible.



CHAPTER XVII

Boy Sees a Vision

Joses when in liquor was wont to boast that his memory was good, and he was right upon the whole. But on this occasion he had forgotten something, and that something was Billy Bluff. Billy and Joses had met before, as Monkey Brand had pointed out to Mat, and had agreed to dislike each other. And when Joses began his stalk, Billy Bluff started on a stalk of his own.

Boy Woodburn, peeping between two rocks, watched with grim glee. Her senses, quick as those of a wild creature, had warned her long ago of the Great Beast's approach. For Joses to imagine he could take her by surprise was as though a beery bullock believed that he could catch a lark. The girl was almost sorry for the man: his fatness, his fatuity appealed to her pity. Alert as a leopard, she was not in the least afraid of him. In the wood, true, he had caught her, but her downfall there she owed to a sprain. Here in the open, in her riding things, she could run rings about her enemy.

Lying on her face behind the rock, she watched the little drama.

Billy Bluff, wet still from the sea, his hair clinging about his ribs, and giving him the air of a heraldic griffin, crept on the puffing fat man and hurled at him with a roar.

The assault was entirely unexpected.

"You—bear!" blurted Joses, the picturesque phrase popping out of him like a cork from a heady bottle of champagne.

He struggled to his feet, picked up a stone, and slung it at the charging dog.

Billy Bluff meant business; and it was well for his enemy that the stone struck him on the fore-paw. The blow steadied, but it did not stop, the dog. He gave a little gurgle and came again on three legs in silent fury.

Joses made for the cliff, where a fall had constituted a steep ramp. He scrambled up it, an avalanche of chalk slipping away from beneath his feet and half burying the pursuing dog.

He panted up to the top of the ramp, and stood with his back to the cliff, looking down on his attacker.

Billy Bluff could not make his footing good upon the shale.

He lay at the foot of the cliff, one eye on his prey, licking his damaged paw, and swearing beneath his breath. And it was clear he did not mean to budge.

Joses turned his face to the cliff. He got his hands on the top, and lifting himself, could just peer over the edge of the cliff and see the green and the gorse beyond. Unaided, he could do no more.

Happily help was at hand.

A man on a chestnut pony was standing on the turf not twenty yards away.

"Give me a hand up, will you?" he panted. "That —— of a dog!"

The young man approached.

"By all means," he said, in a deep, familiar voice.

It was Silver.

Joses did not mind that. He was not at all above taking a hand from an enemy in an emergency.

And young Silver seemed surprisingly kind. Big men usually were.

The young man got off his pony, came to the edge of the cliff, and gave the perspiring tout his hand. With a heave and a lurch Joses scrambled to the top.

How strong the fellow was! No horse would ever get away with him.

"Good of you," panted the fat man, rising to his feet.

"Not at all," replied Silver. "It was less trouble to pull you up than to come down to you."

There was a note in his quiet voice Joses did not like.

"What you mean?" he asked.

"I'm going to give you a hiding," observed the other mildly.

Joses looked aghast at his rescuer and snorted. He shot forward his shaggy face, and the action seemed to depress his chest and obtrude his stomach.

"Whaffor?" he asked, in tones that betrayed the fact that such experiences were not entirely new to him.

"I don't know," said Silver in his exasperatingly lazy way. "I feel I'd rather like to."

He seemed quietly amused, much more so than was Joses. And he meant what he said. His clean, calm face, his mouth so determined and yet so mild, his steady eyes and the thrust of his jaw, all betrayed his resolution.

"Here, stow it!" stammered the fat man. "Chuck the chaff. A gentleman!"

"I'm not chaffing," said Silver in a matter-of-fact way. "How d'you like it?"

"What ye mean?"

"Will you put your hands up—or will you take it lying?"

His pony's rein was over the young man's arm; and they were standing on the edge of the cliff. Joses, weighing his chances with the swift and comprehending eye of fear, marked it greedily. Silver was young, strong, an athlete; but he was handicapped.

Joses's cunning was returning to reinforce his doubtful heart.

"That's Heart of Oak, isn't it?" he asked.

"Is it?" said the young man.

"The model polo pony," continued Joses. "Refused L600 for him at Islington, didn't you? And I don't blame you. You're rich, we all know, Mr. Silver. L600's no more to you than sixpence to me. But there's the pony! You can't replace him. Pity if he got away here on the edge of the cliff and all."

For the second time that morning Joses's luck deserted him.

"I'll hold your pony," said a deep voice from behind.

The fat man turned.

Boy Woodburn stood behind him.

Fresh from the sea, her hair in short, thick plaits of gold, dark and wet and bare; with the eyes of a sword and the colour of an apple-blossom; the brine upon her and the brown of wind and sun; in her breeches, boots, and jersey, her big dog straining on his lead, she looked like Diana turned post-boy.

"Thank you," said the young man, handing over his pony.

Joses snorted.

"Call yourself a woman!" he cried.

"I'm all right," answered the girl, seating herself critically on a mound, the pony in one hand, the dog in the other. "Don't hit him over the heart," she advised out of some experience of race-course scraps. "There might be trouble."

"I sha'n't hit him at all," replied the young man. He seized the fat man by the shoulder and spun him round. "I shall—shake him, and—punt him."

The girl did not know what punting meant, but it sounded good and was not so bad to watch.

Silver was applying his knee to his victim with precision and power. The fat man's teeth seemed to rattle under the pounding shocks. The words came joggling out of him, and they were not pretty words. He struck backward with his arms and feet, wriggling to get his plump shoulders free; but he was helpless as a baby in the arms of a nurse.

Silver was strong. Joses was right in that if in nothing else.

"He's killing me!" he gasped. "Fetch the coastguard!"

"No, thank you," said the girl.

The young man loosed his prey at last, and sent him spinning forward, projecting him with a kick.

Joses fell on his face, and stayed there fumbling, while he vomited oaths.

"Look out!" cried the girl sharply. "He's got a knife, and he'll use it."

She was right. Joses was busy with that wooden-handled sheath-knife of his.

Silver took a step forward.

"Ah, then!—would you?" he scolded, and hit the other a tap over the wrist with the handle of his hunting crop.

Joses yelped and dropped the knife.

Then he scrambled to his feet, wringing his hand.

The brown of his face had turned a dirty livid.

"I see what it is!" he cried. "Assignation. And I spoiled the sport—what! You and the dandy toff.

Him and me, Beside the sea.

Quite unintentional, I assure you!"

He bowed, cackling horribly.

Silver looked ugly.

"Now then!" he said, and advanced a pace.

The girl put a staying hand upon him; and the tout shambled away toward the Gap, muttering to himself.

Silver turned to his companion. He was breathing deep, but outwardly unmoved.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yes," she said. "He knocked Billy Bluff out, but he didn't touch me. Hold your paw, Bill! It's nothing much. I shall put him on a wet bandage soaked in borax when I get home."

A sound of hand-clapping and hoarse laughter ascended to them from the Gap.

Joses had slipped Ragamuffin's reins over the post, and was clapping his hands. Then he took up a pebble and threw it at the roan. The old pony went off at a gallop and with trailing reins.

Boy watched him calmly.

"I should have thought of that," she said.

Silver was starting off down the hill toward the mocking figure at the mouth of the Gap; but the girl stopped him.

"You get on and ride up the valley," she said. "Ragamuffin'll stop to graze under the lighthouse; and you'll collar him there."

Silver hesitated.

"What about you?" he asked.

"I shall be all right," she answered. "I've got the legs of him."

He mounted and went off at a canter, Billy Bluff pursuing him.

The girl walked down toward the Gap, looking ridiculously slight in her post-boy attire.

Joses had disappeared.

As she came to the mouth of the Gap and picked up her coat, her towel, and the tackle she had thrown down, she saw him.

He was standing in the Gap, between the white chalk walls, nursing his hand.

She was glad he was down there. He would be safe at least from Mr. Silver.

As she put on her coat she looked at him with calm, musing eyes. The Spirit of Action was laid to sleep in her. In its place a Moving Dream, welling up as it were out of Time into Eternity, possessed her slowly. These Other-Conscious Moments, as Mr. Haggard called them, grew on the girl with the growing years. She was aware of them in others—in her mother, Mr. Haggard, her grand-dad—but hardly so in herself. They were of her, yet beyond her—mysterious invasions from she knew not where, gleams of Eden from exile. At these times she saw men as trees walking and all created things as part and expression of a Huge Vague Life of Wonder and Beauty without end.

And now, as she looked at the man in the Gap she said with quiet severity, as though addressing one of the lads at Bible Class:

"You are a naughty boy."

He glanced up at her from his earth.

She saw his eyes, and the suffering in them, and recognised them with a start. They were the eyes of a fox she had seen last season dug out of an earth to the screams of men and halloos of women, after a long run, that hounds might not be defrauded of blood.

And she felt now as she had felt then. A passion of sympathy, a sea of furious indignation, boiled up within her. Something pitifully forlorn about the man struck her to the heart. Quite suddenly she felt sorry for him; sorry with the sorrow that has sent heroes and saints throughout the ages to persecution and death with joy, if only they may relieve by ever so little the sufferings of sinful humanity.

Boy Woodburn was not a saint and was not a hero; but she was on the way to be a woman. The Voice that was not hers spoke out of her deeps.

"Why did you do that?" she asked quietly.

There was no anger in her tone or spirit; no sorrow, no surprise. She was curiously impersonal.

The fox showed his teeth.

"I'll do worse than that yet," he said.

The girl found herself gulping.

She looked at him through shining eyes. And as she did so it came in upon her that this degraded creature had once been beautiful. Ruin as he was, there was still about him something tragic and forlorn as of a great moor over which a beaten host has retreated, leaving desolation in its wake.

The man in the Gap wrung his wrist.

The girl took a step toward him.

"May I look at it?" she said.

He glanced up at her again, much as glances a dog which has had a licking and is uncertain whether the hand stretched out is that of an enemy or a friend.

"Likely," he snarled. "You'd bite."



CHAPTER XVIII

Two on the Downs

Silver came trotting up with Ragamuffin trailing discontentedly behind.

The old roan didn't really mind being caught, but he dearly loved to pretend he did.

Billy Bluff, who had already forgotten his injury, limped along behind, busy and cheerful.

Both man and dog had on their faces the same jolly grin of health and happiness, the result of a sound conscience and still more a sound digestion.

"He didn't take much catching," said the young man. "And Billy Bluff helped."

Boy looked at her dog.

"I saw him helping," she said sternly. "You old scoundrel, you!"

The young dog lay on the ground and gnawed his wounded paw complacently. He loved being scolded by his mistress when she was not too serious.

The girl stuffed her towel and all it contained into the forage bag.

"Shall I give you a leg up?" asked Silver.

"It's all right," she answered.

She mounted and rode alongside him.

"Where's our friend?" he asked.

"Gone to earth."

"What!—down the Gap?" He turned on her with that delightful eagerness which constantly revealed him to her as a boy in spite of that plain, grave face of his. "Shall I draw him?"

She shook her head gravely.

"Poor old thing," she said.

He steadied instantly to her mood.

"Are you sorry for him?" he asked.

Boy looked away, shy and wary.

"Sometimes," she said. "He must have had a pig's time to be so rotten as that."

It was a new view to the young man, and sobered him.

"Perhaps," he said doubtfully. He was thinking out the question in his slow way. "It may be his own fault," he said. "You make yourself, I think."

"Part," answered the girl. "And part you are made by your surroundings. That's the way with young stock anyhow. It's a bit how they are bred—the blood in them; and part the food they get, and the air and liberty and sun they're allowed."

"I suppose so," said Silver quietly. "Certainly our friend's food don't seem to have suited him."

The girl refused to be amused.

"He's come down," she said. "Mr. Haggard says he was once a gentleman."

"Some time since, I should guess," replied Silver. "What!"

They were moving along a narrow cart-track that led across a fallow. He was riding behind her, his eyes on her back. The bathing cap had been stuffed away, and her hair, still dark from the sea, was bare to the sun.

"I'm glad you came," she said casually over her shoulder.

"I was just out for a canter before going to look at the horses," he answered.

She nodded to where against the skyline a string of tall, thin-legged black creatures, each with a blob of jockey on his back, paraded solemnly against the sky.

"See them!" she said. "On the Mare's Back." She watched them critically. "That's Make-Way-There—No. 2 in the string. Now she's playing up." She lifted her voice. "Don't pull at her, you little goat!"

"They're going to gallop her this morning, I believe," said Silver. "You hear Chukkers has let me down?"

"No!" cried the girl keenly.

"Yes; he wired last night to say he couldn't ride for me at Paris."

If it was news to the girl, it was by no means unexpected, and she took the blow with philosophical calm.

"That was certain once he knew we were training for you," she said. "I suppose dad's going to see who he'll give the ride to."

"Shall we canter?" said the young man. "I don't want to miss it."

"That's all right," replied the girl. "Father won't set 'em their work till I come."

It was clear she wished to keep him walking at her side, and he was pleased.

The incident on the cliff had brought them closer. For the first time the young man felt the warmth of the girl breaking through the barriers of her reserve. Her eyes, when they met his, were friendly, even affectionate. It was his turn to be pleasantly shy.

"D'you love them?" she asked.

She felt somehow so much older than he that she was free to question him.

"The horses?" he asked. "Rur-rather," with that infectious enthusiasm of his.

"You've got some pretty good ones," she told him.

"D'you think so?" keenly.

She nodded.

"Raw, but they'll come on. That's what you want."

"Any up to National form?" he asked.

"Make-Way-There might be good enough in a season or two if she'll stay," she said. "You can never tell. She's only four off."

They began to breast the slope of the Mare's Back.

"I've only had one real ambition in life," he said confidentially.

She looked at him.

"What?"

"To win the Nun-National."

She beamed on him friendly.

"I used to have one," she said—"till last year: tremendously."

"What's that?"

"To ride the National winner."

She peeped to see if he was mocking. He was sober as a judge.

"You may yet."

"Not now."

"Why not?" he asked. "Because it's against the National Hunt Rules?"

"Not that," she said with scorn. "I could get round their rotten rules if I wanted."

"How?" he asked.

She glanced at him warily.

"Eighteen months ago a lad came into our stable who was rather like me."

He laughed merrily.

"Good for you!" he cried. "Now put your idea into practise."

She shook her head.

"Why not?"

"I don't want to win the National now."

"Don't you?"

She looked up into his face.

"I'm too old," she said. "I've got to put my hair up this winter."

The confidence once made frightened her.

She broke into a canter, Heart of Oak striding at her side. The hill steepened against them just under the brow, and they came back into a walk.

"If I was my own master I should farm and breed horses," said the young man.

She glanced at him keenly.

"Aren't you your own master?"

He shook his head.

"I've got to stick to the desk."

"D'you like it?"

He looked away.

"I shall never make a banker," he said. "You see, I'm no good at sums." He flicked at the turf with his thong. "Now my father was a born financier. He could do that—and nothing much else. If there are no banks in heaven I'm afraid he'll be terribly bored. But I'm a farmer—or a fool; I'm not quite sure which. If my father had lived it might have been different. He might have entered me. But he died during my second year at Oxford four years ago, and I had to buckle to and do the best I could for myself."

"Bad luck," said the girl.

"It was, rather," admitted the young man. "But it gave me my head in one way. You see, father didn't approve of horses, though he was a farmer's son himself. He was afraid of the Turf. But he was always very good to me. He let me hunt when I was a boy though he didn't like it." The young man laughed. "But when I grew big he was awfully pleased. 'You'll never make a jockey now,' he used to say. And I never shall."

Boy ran her eye approvingly over his loose, big-limbed figure.

"You play polo, don't you?" she said.

"I do, a bit," he admitted.

"Back for England, isn't it?" she asked.

"This old pony did," Silver answered. "And he used to take me along sometimes."

"Don't you play still?" she inquired.

"I haven't this season, and I sha'n't again," he answered. "To play first-class polo you must be in the top of condition. And they keep my nose too close to the grindstone. Besides, pup-polo's very jolly, but 'chasing's the thing!"

They topped the brow. The crest of the Downs swelled away before them like a great green carpet lifted by the wind.

"There they are!" cried Boy, beginning to canter.



CHAPTER XIX

Cannibal's National

Old Mat sat dumped in familiar attitude on a cob as full of corners and character as himself.

The trainer was thumping mechanically with his heels, sucking at the knob of his ash-plant, his legs in trousers that had slipped up to show his gray socks, and his feet shod with elastic-sided boots.

He glanced shrewdly at the pair as they rode up.

"Good morning, sir," he said, touching his hat. "So Chukkers has chucked you."

"So I believe," answered Silver.

"I wep' a tear when they tell me. I did reelly," said the old man, dabbing his eye. "He's goin' to ride Ikey's Jackaroo—that donkey-coloured waler he brought home from Back o' Sunday. That's what he's after."

Silver nodded.

"I'm not altogether sorry," he said quietly. "And I'm not entirely surprised."

"Nor ain't I," replied Mat, with faint irony. "Not altogether somersaulted with surprise, as you might say. We knows Chukkers, and Chukkers knows us—de we." He dropped his voice. "Monkey Brand'll tell you a tale or two about his ole friend. You arst him one day when you gets him on the go."

He raised his voice and began to thump the air with his fist.

"Rogues and rasqueals, Mr. Silver!" he cried in a kind of ecstasy. "Emmin on you in—same as the Psalmist says. But we got to love 'em all the same; else we'll nebber, nebber lead their liddle feet into the way." He coughed, wiped the back of his hand apologetically across his lips, and ended dryly: "Not the Three J's anyway!"

* * * * *

The horses were walking round the little group. Tall, sheeted thoroughbreds, each with his lad perched like a bird on his back, they swung daintily over the turf, blowing their noses, swishing their long tails, miracles of strength and beauty.

Monkey Brand led them on Goosey Gander, bandaged to the knees and hocks. Albert followed him on Make-Way-There, a pretty bay, with a white star. The lad's lips were turned in, and his face was stiff with aspiration and desire. That morning he hoped to have his chance, and he purposed to make the most of it. Jerry, the economist with the corrugated brow, followed him on a snake-necked chestnut. He sat up aloft, his shoulders square, his little legs clipping his mount, a Napoleon of the saddle, pondering apparently the great things of life and death. In fact, he was cogitating whether if he smoked behind the Lads' Barn at nights it was likely that he would be caught out by Miss Boy. Next came Stanley, the stupid, surreptitiously nagging at the flashy black he rode. Young Stanley was in evil mood, and he meant his horse to know it. His dark and heavy face was full of injured dignity and spite. Last night Chukkers, just back from winning the Australian National, had wired to say he couldn't keep his engagement to ride Make-Way-There at Paris. Monkey Brand would not ride, as his leg had been troubling him again; and Jerry had it that Albert, who was Make-Way-There's lad, was to get the mount. Stanley resented the suggestion. Albert had never yet ridden in public, while he, Stanley, had sported silk half-a-dozen times and had won over the sticks.

"Pull out, Brand," grunted the old trainer.

The little jockey yielded the lead to Albert, and joined the group of watchers.

The lads continued their patrol.

"What's the going like on the top there, Brand?" asked the old man.

"Not so bad, sir," the other answered. "Tidy drop o dew, I reck'n."

Make-Way-There, now she had the lead, showed a tendency to swagger. She bounced and tossed. The fair lad, swaying to the motions of his horse, rode the fretting creature patiently and well.

"She's a bit okkud yet," said Monkey, watching critically. "Woa, my lady. Woa then."

"It's the condition comin' out of her," muttered Mat. "She's all of a bubble. Fret herself into a sweat. Boy, you'd better take her. Send her along five furlongs smart and bustle her a bit as she comes up the slope."

"No," said the girl.

The old man threw a swift glance at her.

Boy had stuck her toes in again. He knew all the symptoms of old and made no effort to overcome them. She was growing into a woman, Boy was. That was the young man. A while back she cared not a rap for all the men in creation.

The old man made a mental note for reference to Ma.

"Albert can ride her," said the girl. "I want to see if he's coming on."

Jerry, the true prophet, winked; Stanley jobbed the black in the mouth and kicked him; Albert, his face firm and important, drew out. He had at least one of the qualities of a jockey—supreme self-confidence.

"Take her along at three-quarter speed till you get round them goss-bushes," growled Old Mat. "And when you feel the hill against you shove her for a furlong. Don't ride her out. And no fancy pranks, mind."

"And sit still," said the girl.

"Jerry, you take him along," continued the trainer.

The lads made sundry guttural noises in their throats, leaned forward as though to whisper in their horses' ears, and stole easily away.

A flash of swift feet, a diminishing thunder of hooves, and the pair made a broad sweep round the gorse-clump and came racing home.

Once the girl spoke.

"Keep your hands quiet," she ordered deeply.

Opposite them Jerry took a pull, but Albert and the mare went thundering past the watching group, the lad's fair head bowed over his horse's withers. He had her fairly extended, yet going well within herself, her head tucked into her chest.

On the ridge behind them he steadied to a walk, jumped off, and led the mare, breathing deep and flinging the foam abroad, down to the party.

"That's a little bit o' better," muttered the old man. "She can slip it. That lad'll ride yet, Boy."

"Perhaps; but don't tell him so," said the girl sharply.

She walked her pony across to the lad, and laid her hand on the mare's wet neck.

"That's a little better to-day, Albert," she said. "But you ought to steady a bit before you come."

The boy touched his cap and rode arrogantly on to join the other lads.

Monkey Brand saw the look upon his face.

"Once you knows you know nothin', you may learn somethin'," he said confidentially as the lad passed him. Then he turned with a wink to Silver and said sotto-voce: "They calls him Boysie when he's crossed 'em. See he apes Miss Boy. He features her a bit, and he knows it. She's teaching him to ride, and he's picked up some of her tricks. Course he ain't got her way with 'em. But he might make a tidy little 'orseman one o' these days, as I tells him, if so be he was to tumble on his head a nice few times and get the conceit knocked out of him."

The lads continued their patrol.

Their knees were to their chins, and their hands thrust in front of them, a rein in each, almost as though they were about to pound a big drum with their fists.

Monkey nodded at them.

"She rides long, Miss Boy do—old style, cavalry style, same as you yourself, sir. They've all got the monkey-up-a-stick seat."

"Don't you believe in it?" asked the young man.

The other shook his head. He was himself a beautiful horseman of the Tom Cannon school; too beautiful, his critics sometimes said, to be entirely effective.

"Not for 'chasin," he said. "You can't lift a horse and squeeze him, unless you've got your legs curled right away round him. They ain't jockeys, as I tells 'em. They rides like poodle-dogs at a circus. There ought to be paper-'oops for em to jump through. No, sir. It may be Chukkers, as I says, but it ain't 'orsemanship."

The young man angled for the story that was waiting to be caught.

"Yet Chukkers wins," he said. "He's headed the list for five seasons now."

"He wins," said Monkey grimly. "Them as has rode against him knows 'ow."

Silver edged his pony up along the other.

"You've ridden against him?" he inquired with cunning innocence.

The little jockey's eyes became dreamy.

"My ole pal Chukkers," he mused. "Him and me. Yes, I've rode agin' him twenty year now. He was twelve first time we met, and I was turned twenty. The Mexican Kid they called him in them days. Kid he was; but wise to the world?—not 'alf!" ...

"Was that his first race?" asked Silver.

"It was so, sir—this side. Ikey'd just brought him across the Puddle to ride that Austrian mare, Laria Louisa. Same old stunt it was then as now—Down the Englishman, don't matter how. Yes, it was my first smell of the star-spangled jacket."

"Was that when you got your leg?"

"No, sir. That was eight years later. Boomerang's year. He was the first waler Ikey brought over this side to do the trick. My! he were a proper great 'orse, too. I was riding Chittabob—like a pony alongside him. At the Canal Turn Chukkers ran me onto the rails." He told the tale slowly, rolling it in the mouth, as it were. "Chukkers went on by himself. Nobody near him. Thought he'd done it that time. Only where it was Boomerang snap his leg at the last fence. Yes, sir," mystically, "there's One above all right—sometimes, 'tall events."

"And you?" said Silver.

The little jockey thrust out his left leg.

"I was in 'orspital three months.... Howsomever, it come out in the wash next year."

"That was Cannibal's year, wasn't it?" asked Silver.

"Ah!" said Monkey. "Cannibal!—his name and his nature, too. He was a man-eater, that 'orse was. Look like a camel and lep like a h'earthquake. It was just the very reverse that year. Chukkers was on Jezebel, Chukkers was. She was a varmint little thing enough—Syrian bred, I have 'eard 'em say. And he was out to win all right that journey. There was only us two in it when we come to Beecher's Brook second time round." He came a little closer. "So when we got to the Canal Turn I rides up alongside. 'That you, Mr. Childers?' I says, and bumps him. That shifted him for Valentine's Brook. There's a tidy drop there, sir, as you may remember. Chukkers lost his stirrup, and was crawling about on her withers. I hove up alongside agin'. He saw me comin' and made a shockin' face. 'Clear!' he screams, 'or I'll welt you across the —— monkey mug!' And just then, blest if old Cannibal didn't make another mistake and cannon into him agin'. That spilt him proper! Oh, my, Mr. Silver!—my! And I sail 'ome alone. Oh, he was a reg'lar outrageous 'orse, Cannibal was." He dropped his voice. "When he come out of 'orspital of course he made a fuss about it, he and Jaggers and Jew-boy Aaronsohnn. But of course I knew nothin' about it; nor did nobody else. See, they all knew Chukkers. He'd tried it on 'em all one time or another. And I told the Stewards I was very sorry the fall had gone to 'is 'ead. Only little Bertie Butler—him with the squint, what won the Sefton this year, you know—who'd been following Chukkers—he says to me: 'Next time you're goin' to play billiards with Chukkers, Mr. Brand, tip us the wink, will you?'"



CHAPTER XX

The Paddock Close

The girl's voice broke in on them.

"I'm going home now," she cried abruptly.

"Right," answered Silver. "May I come along?"

As he swung round, he saw the girl already jogging away. He pursued leisurely, anxious to talk about Make-Way-There, the Paris Meeting, and Chukkers and Monkey Brand's gossip. But she flitted away in front of him. As he drew up to her she broke into a canter, and the young man took a pull.

His intuitions, like those of most slow-brained men, were unusually swift and sure. It was as though Nature, the Dispenser of Justice, to compensate him for an apparent dearth in one direction, had endowed him richly in another.

"Woa, my little lad, woa then!" he murmured as Heart of Oak bounced and fretted to catch the retreating roan.

He realised that the girl had withdrawn within herself again. On the cliff, in the excitement of action, she had forgotten herself for the moment. Now she was cold and shy once more, retreating behind her barriers, closing her visor. It was as though she had admitted him too close; and to recover herself must now swing to the other extreme.

Obedient to her will, he kept several lengths behind her. When she found he did not draw up alongside, she slackened her pace. He felt her resistance was dying down in answer to his non-resistance. She was shoving against emptiness, and getting no good from it.

As they came to the crest of the Downs and began the descent of the hill, Boy dropped into a walk.

Below them the long roofs of Putnam's showed, weathered among the sycamores.

As the girl passed into the Paddock Close he was riding at her side again.

The Paddock Close was a vast enclosure, fenced off from the Downs, an ideal nursery and galloping ground for young stock.

There was hill and valley; here and there a group of trees for shade in the dog-days; a great sheltered bottom fringed by a wood that ran out into the Close like a peninsula; and the wall of the Downs to give protection from the east.

As they walked together down the hill, Boy was looking about her.

"Where's the mare?" she asked.

They were the first words she had spoken.

"Which mare?" asked Silver

"Four Pound."

He glanced round. The young stock were standing lazily under the trees, swishing their tails, and stamping off the flies. But the old mare had forsaken her usual haunt.

Then far away on the edge of a bed of bracken in the bottom, something like a piece of brown paper caught his eye. It rose and fell and flapped in the wind.

Boy saw it, too, and darted off.

"Call Billy Bluff!" she cried over her shoulder; but Billy had already trotted off to the yard to renew the pleasant task of tormenting Maudie and the fan-tails.

The girl made at a canter for the brown paper struggling on the edge of the bracken.

As she came closer she raised a swift hand to steady the man pounding behind her.

The brown paper was a new-born foal, woolly, dun of hue, swaying on uncertain legs. The little creature, with the mane and tail of a toy horse, looking supremely pathetic in its helplessness, wavered ridiculously in the wind. It was all knees and hocks, and fluffy tail that wriggled, and jelly-like eyes. Its tall, thin legs were stuck out before and behind like those of a wooden horse. It stood like one dazed, staring blankly before it, absorbed in the new and surprising action of drawing breath through widespread nostrils; quavered and then collapsed, only to attempt to climb to its feet again.

Close beside her child lay the mother, her neck extended along the green, her eyes blood-shot.

As the girl rode up, the old mare raised her gaunt, well-bred head and snorted, but made no effort to rise.

Boy dismounted.

"Hold Ragamuffin, will you?" she said.

Silver, himself dismounted now, obeyed.

Boy knelt in the bracken and felt the mare's heart.

The young man stood some distance off and watched her.

"Pretty bad, isn't she?" he said gravely.

"Go and tell mother, please," replied the girl, still on her knees. "And send one of the lads with a rug and a wheelbarrow."

The young man walked away down the hillside, leading the two ponies.

Left alone, Boy brushed away the flies that had settled in black clouds on the mare's face. The foal repeated its ungainly efforts, whimpering in a deep and muffled voice, like the wind in a cave. The urge of hunger was on it, and it did not understand why it was not satisfied. Boy went to it, and thrust her thumbs into its soft and toothless mouth. The foal, entirely unafraid, sucked with quivering tail and such power that the girl thought her thumbs would be drawn off. The old mare whinnied, jealous, perhaps, of her usurped function.

In another moment Mrs. Woodburn's tall and stately form came through the gate and laboured up the hill. She was wearing a white apron and carried a sheet in her hand.

Soon she stood beside her daughter, breathing deeply, and looking down upon the mare.

"Bad job, Boy," she said.

"Have you brought a thermometer?" asked the girl.

Mrs. Woodburn nodded, and inserted the instrument under the old mare's elbow, laying an experienced hand on her muzzle.

"If she'd make an effort," she said in her slow way. "But she can't be bothered. That's Black Death."

Silver, looking ridiculously elegant in his shirt-sleeves and spotless breeches, came up the hill toward them, trundling a dingy stable barrow. Behind him trotted a lad, trailing a rug.

"We must just let her bide," said Mrs. Woodburn. "Lay that sheet over her, George, to keep the flies off, and get a handful of sweet hay and put it under her nose to peck at it. You've brought the barrow, Mr. Silver. Thank you."

"Can you lift the foal in?" asked Boy.

"I guess," answered the young man, stripping up sleeves in which the gold links shone.

"Oh! your poor clothes!" cried Mrs. Woodburn. "Whatever would your mother say? Put on my apron, do."

The young man obeyed, gravely and without a touch of self-consciousness, binding the apron about his waist; and to Boy at least he appeared, so clad, something quite other than ludicrous.

"Can you manage it, d'you think?" she asked in her serious way.

"I guess," answered the young man.

He blew elaborately on his hands, made belief to lick them, and bowed his back to the lifting. There were no weak spots in that young body. It was good all through.

Strong as he was tender, he gathered the little creature. A moment it sprawled helplessly in his arms, all legs and head. Then he bundled it into the barrow.

The old mare whinnied.

"Put the rug over her head so she can't see," said Mrs. Woodburn.

The foal stood a moment in the barrow, then it collapsed, lying like a calf with a woolly tail, its long legs projecting over the side.

Silver grasped the handles of the barrow.

"Is it all right?" asked Boy.

"I guess," replied the young man, and trundled his load away down the hill.

The girl walked beside the barrow, one hand steadying the foal, who reared an uncanny head.

They passed through the yard, jolted noisily over the cobbles, and turned into a great cool loose-box, deep in moss-litter.

"I'll go and get the bottle," said the girl. "George, just run and bring a couple of armfuls of litter-grass off the stack and pile it in that corner."

When she returned with the bottle, the barrow was empty, and the foal lay quiet on a heap of brown grass in the corner.

It whinnied and essayed to stand.

"It's coming, honey," said Boy in her deep, comforting voice.

The foal sucked greedily and with quivering tail.

From outside in the yard came the pleasant clatter of horses' feet on the cobbles.

The string was returning.

In another moment Old Mat was standing in the door of the loose-box, grunting to himself, as he watched the little group within.

Boy, in her long riding-coat, stood in the dim loose-box, her fair hair shining, tilting the bottle, while the foal, with lifted head and ecstatic tail, sucked.

Silver, still in his shirt-sleeves, watched with folded arms.

"Colt foal I see," grunted the old man. "That's a little bit o' better. Four-Pound-the-Second, I suppose you'll call him."



BOOK III

SILVER MUG



CHAPTER XXI

The Berserker Colt

On the morning that Make-Way-There had done his gallop Old Mat had noted that a change was coming over Boy.

She was ceasing to be a child, and was becoming a woman.

He mentioned it to Ma.

"Time she did," said the mother quietly. "She'll be seventeen in March."

The girl herself was aware of strange happenings within her. More, she knew that the tall young man was responsible for them.

A great new life, full of shadows and delicious dangers, was surging up in her heart, sweeping across the sands of her childhood, obliterating tide-marks, swinging her off her feet, and carrying her forward under bare stars toward the Unknown.

She fought against the invasion of this Sea, struggling to find footing on the familiar bottom.

That Sea and Mr. Silver were intimately connected. Sometimes, indeed, the girl could not distinguish one from the other. Was it the Sea which bore Mr. Silver in upon her resisting mind?—or was it Mr. Silver who trailed the Sea after him like a cloud?

Her helplessness angered and humiliated her. She fought fiercely and in vain. That strong will of hers, which had never yet met its match, was impotent now. This Thing, this Sea, this Man, crept in upon her like a mist, invading her very sanctuaries.

She might close the doors and lock them—to no purpose.

She was angry, excited, not entirely displeased.

The change wrought in her swiftly. At least she had the sense that she was embarking on a great adventure; and her romantic spirit answered to the appeal.

She became quieter and passed much time in her room alone.

Mr. Silver kept knocking at the door in the loft which he had never entered; but she refused to open to him.

To revenge herself she practised small brutalities upon him, which had no effect. He just withdrew and came again next day with his big-dog smile, quiet and persistent as a tide. Shy he was, and singularly pertinacious.

Then his mother died.

That seemed to Boy unfair; but as she reasoned it out he could hardly be held responsible.

They knew all about it at Putnam's, because there was a paragraph in the paper about Brazil Silver's widow.

The young man buried his mother on Friday, and on Saturday came down to Putnam's for his usual week-end.

Boy asked her mother if he had spoken to her about his trouble.

"No," said Mrs. Woodburn.

"Then he shall to me," said the girl, with determination.

He should not bottle up his grief. That would be bad for him. The mother in the girl was emerging from the tom-boy very fast.

On Sunday evening she took him for a ride, and had her way, without a struggle.

As they breasted the hill together, the young man told her all at some length.

"Was she much to you?" asked the girl keenly.

Her own mother was all the world to her.

He shook his head.

"Oh! that's all right," replied the girl, relieved and yet resentful, "if you didn't care."

"In some ways I'm glad for her sake," continued the young man. "She was always unhappy. You see she was ambitious. One of the disappointments of her life was that my father wouldn't take a peerage."