About its head was a rope hackamore; it was tethered to a door post, and in the background a white man moved about at a respectful distance with a proprietorial air, beside him a negro hostler with a towsack tied about his waist with a string. MacCallum and Bayard halted at the gate, and the white man circled the stallion’s haughty immobility and crossed to them. The negro hostler came forth also, with a soft, dirty cloth and chanting in a mellow singsong. The stallion permitted him to approach and suffered him to erase with his rag the licking nervous little flames that ran in renewed ripples under its skin.
“Ain’t he a picture, now?” the white man demanded of MacCallum, leaning his elbow on the gate. A cheap nickel watch was attached to his suspender loop by a length of rawhide lace leather worn black and soft with age, and his shaven beard was heaviest from the corners of his mouth to his chin: he looked always as though he were chewing tobacco with his mouth open.
He was a horse-trader by profession, and he was constantly engaged in litigation with the railroad company over the violent demise of his stock by its agency. “Look at that nigger, now,” he added. “He’ll let Tobe handle him like a baby. I wouldn’t git within ten foot of him, myself. Dam’f I know how Tobe does it. Must be some kin between a nigger and a animal, I always claim.”
“I reckon he’s afraid you’ll be crossing the railroad with him some day about the time Thirty-nine is due,” MacCallum said drily.
“Yes, I reckon I have the hardest luck of any feller in the county,” the other agreed. “But they got to settle this time: I got ’em dead to rights, this time.”
“Yes,” MacCallum said, “the railroad company ought to furnish that stock of yourn with time tables.” The other onlookers guffawed.
“Ah, the company’s got plenty of money,” the trader rejoined. Then he said: “You talk like I might have druv them mules in front of that train. Lemme tell you how it come about—”
“I reckon you won’t never drive him in front of no train.” MacCallum jerked his head toward the stallion. The negro burnished its shimmering coat, crooning to it in a monotonous singsong. The trader laughed.
“I reckon not,” he admitted, “not less’n Tobe goes too. Just look at him now. I wouldn’t no more walk up to that animal than I’d fly.”
“I’m going to ride that horse,” Bayard said suddenly.
“What hoss?” the trader demanded, and the other onlookers watched Bayard climb the gate and vault over into the lot.
“You let that hoss alone, young feller,” the trader said. But Bayard paid him no heed. He went on; the stallion swept its regal regard upon him and away.
“You let that hoss alone,” the trader shouted, “or I’ll have the law on you.”
“Let him be,” MacCallum said.
“And let him damage a fifteen-hundred-dollar stallion? That hoss’ll kill him. You, Sartoris!”
From his hip pocket MacCallum drew a wad of bills enclosed by a rubber band. “Let him be,” he repeated. “That’s what he wants.”
The trader glanced at the roll of money with quick calculation. “I take you gentlemen to witness—” he began loudly; then he ceased, and they watched tensely as Bayard approached the stallion. The beast swept its haughty, glowing eye upon him again and lifted its head without alarm and snorted. The negro glanced over his shoulder and crouched against the animal, and his crooning chant rose to a swifter beat. “Go back, white folks,” he said.
The beast snorted again and swept its head up, snapping the rope like a gossamer thread, and the negro grasped at the flying rope-end. “Git away, white folks,” he cried. “Git away, quick.”
But the stallion eluded his hand. It cropped its teeth in a vicious arc and the negro leaped sprawling as the animal soared like a bronze explosion.
Bayard had dodged beneath the sabring hooves, and as the horse swirled in a myriad flickering like fire, the spectators saw that the man had contrived to take a turn with the rope-end about its jaws; then they saw the animal rear again, dragging the man from the ground and whipping his body like a rag upon its flashing arc. Then it stopped, trembling, as Bayard closed its nostrils with the twisted rope, and suddenly he was upon its back while it stood with lowered head and rolling eyes, rippling its coat into quivering tongues before exploding again.
The beast burst like bronze unfolding wings; the onlookers tumbled away from the gate and hurled themselves to safety as the gate splintered to matchwood beneath its soaring volcanic thunder. Bayard crouched on its shoulders and dragged its mad head around and they swept down the lane, spreading pandemonium among the horses and mules tethered and patient about the blacksmith shop and among the wagons there.
Where the lane debouched into the street a group of negroes scattered before them, and without a break in its stride the stallion soared over a small negro child clutching a stick of striped candy directly in its path. A wagon drawn by mules was just turning into the lane: these reared madly before the wild, slack-jawed face of the white man in the wagon, and again Bayard sawed his thunderbolt around and headed it away from the square. Down the lane behind him the spectators ran shouting through the dust, the trader among them, and Rafe MacCallum still clutching his roll of money.
The stallion moved beneath him like a tremendous mad music, uncontrolled, splendidly uncontrollable. The rope served only to curb its direction, not its speed, and among shouts from the pavement on either hand he swung the animal into another street.
This was a quieter street; soon they would be in the country, where the stallion could exhaust its rage without the added hazards of motors and pedestrians. Voices faded behind him in his own thunder: “Runaway! Runaway!” But the street was deserted save for a small automobile going in the same direction, and further along beneath the green tunnel, bright small spots of color scuttled out of the street. Children. “Hope they stay there,” he said to himself.
His eyes were streaming a little; beneath him the surging lift and fall; in his nostrils a sharpness of rage and energy and violated pride like smoke from the animal’s body, and he swept past the motor car, remarking in a flashing second a woman’s face and a mouth partly open and two eyes round with tranquil astonishment. But the face flashed away without registering on his mind and he saw the children huddled on one side of the street, and on the opposite side a negro playing a hose on the sidewalk and beside him a second negro with a pitchfork.
Someone screamed from a veranda, and the huddle of children broke, shrieking. A small figure in a white shirt and diminutive pale blue pants darted into the street and Bayard leaned downward and wrapped the rope about his hand and swerved the beast toward the opposite sidewalk where the two negroes stood, gape-mouthed. The small figure came on, flashed safely behind; then a narrow band of rushing green, a tree trunk like a wheel spoke in reverse, and the stallion struck clashing fire from wet concrete. It slid, clashed, fighting for balance, lunged and crashed down, and for Bayard a red shock, then blackness.
The horse scrambled up and whirled and poised and struck viciously at, the prone man with its hooves, but the negro with the pitchfork drove it away and it trotted stiffly and with tossing head up the street and passed the halted motorcar. At the end of the street it stood trembling and snorting and permitted the negro hostler to touch it. Rafe MacCallum still clutched his roll of bills.
6
They gathered him up and brought him to town in a commandeered motorcar and roused Dr. Peabody from slumber, and Dr. Peabody profanely bandaged Bayard’s head and gave him a drink from the bottle which resided in the cluttered wastebasket, and threatened to telephone Miss Jenny if he didn’t go straight home.
Rafe MacCallum promised to see that he did so, and the owner of the impressed automobile offered to drive him out. It was a Ford body with, in place of a tonneau, a miniature one-room cabin of sheet iron, no larger than a dog kennel, in each painted window of which a painted housewife simpered across a painted sewing machine; in it an actual sewing machine neatly fitted, borne thus about the countryside by the agent.
The agent’s name was V. K. Suratt and he now sat, with his shrewd, plausible face, behind the wheel. Bayard with his humming head sat beside him, and to the fender clung a youth with brown forearms and a slanted extremely new straw hat, who let his limber body absorb the jolts with negligent ease as they rattled sedately out of town on the valley road.
The drink Dr. Peabody had given him, instead of quieting his jangled nerves, rolled sluggishly and hotly in his stomach and served only to nauseate him a little, and against his closed eyelids red antic shapes coiled in throbbing and tedious cycles.
He watched them dully and without astonishment as they emerged from blackness and
