Jack staggered to his feet and stood straight. “He turned into a steel cable on springs,” he said quietly. “And then somebody got hold of the far end of the cable and cracked it a couple of times under me.”
He smiled, but his eyes were still blank with the shock that he had received.
Back they went to John Brett and the murmuring, horror-stricken crowd.
“I’ll teach somebody to handle him,” protested Torridon eagerly. “I know that with time I can do it.”
John Brett smiled bitterly.
“I spent half my life at the breeding of that hoss,” he said with unbreakable gloom. “And now it sort of looks like I’d done all of that work for a Torridon.”
He turned on his heel and walked toward the house, and for the first time in many months Torridon felt the gulf open at his feet. He was a Torridon; they were Bretts. Nothing on earth could heal the breach.
X
Autumn and the school year were at hand now, but Torridon worked feverishly through the interim to try to teach one member of the household to back the stallion with safety. Charlie was the willing pupil. To Charlie he taught the whistle, the call; to Charlie he taught the tricks of guiding without reins, by voice, by gesture and signal, by sway of the body.
It was utterly of no avail.
Released from the hand of his master, the black colt was a tiger instantly. Twice a serious mauling of Charlie was barely averted, and Charlie gave up the effort. John Brett, when this was explained to him, smiled, half sadly, and half in anger. But he spoke no more about the colt. One might have thought that Ashur was no more to him than a shadow of a horse.
But Torridon knew better, and, watching that stern, cold face, he saw that he had outworn his welcome among this clan of his enemies. The court takes its tone from the king; all eyes fell coldly upon him, except the eyes of Nancy and those of Jack.
Those two, stanch as oak, did not alter. One day Jack stopped at the house with word that Nancy wanted to see him.
“She’s gone out riding up Bramble River. You’d catch her along that road, Paul, if you rode Ashur.”
Paul saddled Ashur in haste and started out.
The way to the Bramble River led through a semicircle of trails and roads, but with Ashur it was possible to go cross-country like a bird. There was sadness in the heart of Torridon as he went, for it might be the last day he backed the stallion. At any moment he expected from John Brett the command never to go near the black colt again.
They reached the river road at last. It was not really a road. No one ever had leveled it, but strong wagons had been dragged along its course more than once, and, where wheels once had traveled, it was the custom to speak of a road. It was in reality merely a winding hint of a trail, twisting back and forth among the trees. Then Paul saw a rider before him, a woman. He called to Ashur, and the stallion swept up to her like the wind.
She had turned back to face them, laughing with pleasure at the speed of the horse. Laughing more than a little, felt Torridon, at his own eagerness.
“You wanted me, Nancy?”
“Let’s sit down,” said Nancy. “There’s a rock by the water. And Ashur’s such a silly fool. He’s always dancing.”
They tethered Nan’s gelding to a tree. Ashur, certain not to stray, was turned loose, and the two sat on a table-topped rock at the verge of the river. Their feet were on sand as clean and white as the sand of a sea beach. The broad river swept before them. Moving water hypnotizes. Torridon began to feel that they were on an island together—then that the island had broken adrift and was sweeping out into the stream.
Nancy had not spoken. He looked at her presently, startled. He found that she was smiling with thoughtful eyes.
“You’d forgotten that I was with you, I think,” she said.
“Oh, no,” he said, and turned a brilliant red, thereby confessing.
“Well,” said Nancy, nodding. “That’s books. They take you away from things.”
He looked at her with frightened eyes. She was so practical and so full of common sense, often, that he was in awe of her. She differed from the others of her clan. They simply could understand nothing but the earth and things of the earth. That vague, cloudy universe in which he lived they never entered. But Nancy could enter it, if she chose. She knew all about it, he felt, and she wanted none of it. She preferred facts, it seemed. He respected Nancy, and her beauty delighted him, but he was afraid of her. He always had been afraid of her, from the first day when he met her judicial eyes in the school.
“Yes,” he said vaguely.
She shrugged her shoulders. “I wanted to talk to you about yourself,” said Nancy.
Paul sat up straight. He had a stick which he had picked up and he jabbed it nervously into the strip of white sand.
“Don’t do that,” said Nancy. “You’re making the mud show through.”
He threw the stick away with a nervous gesture and clasped his hands together.
She went on: “What are you going to do with yourself, Paul?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean, exactly.”
“Just what I say. For instance, what are you going to do this winter?”
“Teach the school, of course.”
“How old are you, Paul?”
“I’m nineteen. That makes you eighteen, doesn’t it?”
“Do you know that much about me?”
She laughed a little, nodding to herself, laughing at him. And he flushed again. Color always was coming and going in his pale face with every emotion.
“You won’t teach the school, though,” she said, “if you’re wise.”
“And why, Nan?”
“Because you’re a Torridon,” she said bluntly. She frowned, driving home her point with cruelty.
“I’ve always been a Torridon.”
“Different, though.”
“Just as much before.”
“You were only a boy. Children don’t count so much.”
“I’m not so very old now,” said Torridon anxiously.
“You’re a great deal older than you think.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re always looking forward, thinking that you’re going to grow bigger . . .”
“I didn’t think you’d taunt me with that,” said Torridon, straightening his shoulders and growing crimson with shame and sorrow.
“Don’t be silly. I don’t mean your size. You’re big enough. I only mean . . . in your mind. You keep thinking that you’ll change. Perhaps you will. You feel like a child, now, compared to what you hope to be. But the Bretts don’t see things that way. When a boy has his height, he’s a man. Well, you’re a man to us.”
He was silent. There was so much truth in what she said that he could not answer. He was depressed. One always is down-hearted when it appears that another knows the truth about one. Conversation flows out of mysteries, half knowings, partial revealings of what is kept securely hidden, more securely hidden because it is half revealed.
“I’m just the same as I was last year,” he said.
“You’re not, though,” she replied with her usual assurance.
“What’s made the difference?”
“That!” She pointed to Ashur. “Speak to him,” she said.
“Ashur,” he said.
The stallion jerked up his head and looked on his master with bright eyes of love and trust.
“That’s made the difference,” said the girl.
He shook his head, bewildered.
“I mean, when you were a boy, it didn’t matter. But after you mastered the school, and big Jack . . .”
“I didn’t master Jack.”
“What did happen, then?” she asked sharply, still frowning at him. “Don’t talk small, Paul, to make me talk big about what you’ve done.”