Boy Woodburn Part 23

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 hoa.r.s.e laughter ascended to them from the Gap.

Joses had slipped Ragam.u.f.fin'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. "Ragam.u.f.fin'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 Cla.s.s:

"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 pa.s.sion 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 Ragam.u.f.fin 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.