Boy Woodburn Part 36

Silver referred to his wrist-watch.

"It's nearly half-past eleven."

"We must trot," said Boy.

They trotted away, the brown horse and the gray side by side, the regular clap-clap of their feet sometimes overlapping and sometimes beating in unison, only to break eventually again, to the disappointment of the girl's attentive ear. It was the fashion amid the hunting folk to despise hacking along the road as so much waste of time. To the girl the steady tramp along the hard road was like the march of life. She would hack from covert to covert, one of a great cavalcade, men and women, with bobbing heads, their faces set all in the same direction, the sound of the horses' feet splashing all round her like a stream. She would flow along in the centre of that stream, unconscious of those about her, silent when addressed, absorbed in the only music for which she cared.

The noise of Banjo blowing his nose now brought her back to earth. She peeped at the face of the man on the big gray at her side.

"Had a bad time?" she asked warily.

He turned to her, his face lit with the smile that took all the heaviness out of it.

"Worrying," he said.

"Well, you're through now," said the girl.

"Plea Gob," he answered, "till next time. We'd have been in the cart but the Bank of England stood by like a brick."

Their steady pace took them along. They were getting away from the hills, and the Weald was opening before them. The sun shone on them, and the willows on either side the road declared that April was at hand.

They eased down to a walk.

Silver opened his chest.

"I feel like singing!" he cried.

"Sing then," said Boy.

In his quiet booming voice he sang a verse from _Two on the Downs_, which in their long hacks home of evening she had taught him--

_Sing ho!

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

He finished and turned to her with a laugh and shining eyes.

She glanced away, and on her face was that delicious wary look he loved so well, baffling and baffled, disturbing because disturbed, as when a little wind ruffles at evening a willow, exposing to the sky in spite of protest the silvery undersides of naked, shining leaves.

Jim Silver edged across to her.

"Miss Woodburn!" he said quietly. He held out a great gloved hand.

Boy looked resolutely between her horse's ears.

"Trot," she said.

A few straggling foot-pa.s.sengers, an occasional trap, a man on a bicycle, and some children pushing a perambulator, showed them they were drawing near their goal.

About half a mile in front the road opened on to a green. There among trees they could see a gathering of men and horses.

"Good!" cried the young man. "They haven't moved off yet. Shall we slow down?"

"Best get on, I think," replied the girl.

A man in a slouch hat, carrying a gamp as untidy as himself, was walking before them down the middle of the road.

"a.s.s!" muttered the young man. "Why can't he keep to one side?"

Boy shot ahead, Silver took a pull. Banjo made a fuss, took offence, then went striding hugely by, and shied off, splashing through a puddle.

The brown waters rose and drenched the pedestrian.

"Thank _you!_" he called furiously after the horseman.

Banjo, as though frightened at his deed, tried a bolt. A horseman of unusual power, Silver steadied the great horse and swung him across the road. There Banjo sidled, yawed, and pa.s.saged, fretting to be after the brown.

The young man, swinging to the motions of the tossing gray, raised his hand in that large and gracious way of his.

"So sorry," he shouted back.

The man with the gamp shuffled toward him.

"Of course it wasn't deliberate!" he cried.

It was Silver's turn to be angry.

He gripped the gray, lifted him round like a polo pony, and drove him back to the angry man.

"You don't think I'd do a thing like that on purpose!" he said, and saw for the first time that the man with the gamp was Joses.

"You didn't know it was me, of course," sneered the other, shaking with anger.

"I did not," replied Silver, calm and cold as Joses was hot.

"Then I don't believe you," cried the tout.

Silver looked down at him.

"I've said I'm sorry. I've no more to say," he remarked quietly.

"Haven't you?" cried the fat man. "I have, though."

He made a s.n.a.t.c.h at Banjo's rein.

The gray reared, backed away into the ditch, collapsed there on his quarters, and recovered himself with the grunt and flounder of a hippopotamus emerging from a river.

A little crowd was collecting swiftly, drawn by the hopes of a row.

Then there came the clatter of a horse's feet. Boy was coming back to the group at a gallop.