Boy Woodburn | Page 7

spiritual struggle. Then the clouds cleared suddenly.
"Done with you, sir!" he called, and hauled the old mare down the widening lane through the crowd. She came reluctantly, every inch of her resenting the necessity for motion.
Old Mat paid out five sovereigns into the other's outstretched paw.
"Four sovereigns for the mare--and a half for the halter, and a little bit o' beer-money."
The crowd cheered and the gypsy danced a jig.
"You're a gentleman, Mr. Woodburn," he cried. "Now I'll tell you somefin for yourself." He drew the old man aside and whispered in his ear, ending with an emphatic: "S'truth, sir!"
The trainer grunted sceptically.
"Now, Boy," he said. "There she is. Take charge o' your cripple."
The girl, her face alight with pleasure, took the halter of the lagging mare.
Old Mat gathered the reins and mounted to his seat. Monkey Brand took his place at his master's side. Boy got up behind, the halter in her hand.
The trainer raised his whip.
The buggy bumped over the grass, the old mare trailing behind with outstretched neck. The girl folded her arms and looked down her nose like a footman.
Silver, following on his pony, saw her face and chuckled suddenly.
This stern girl had a sense of humour after all.
* * * * *
Then the chaff became a cheer; and the Polefax Meeting was over.
CHAPTER V
Across the Downs
What Old Mat called his little bit of theayter--which his irreverent daughter was wont to describe with characteristic brutality as sheer swank--was quickly over.
As soon as the buggy left the fields and bumped down into the pack-horse track which led up the shoulder of the Downs, Old Mat halted. Boy slipped down from her seat, and the old man and Monkey Brand followed more leisurely. Silver dismounted, too.
The little cavalcade wound slowly up the hill, skirting the steep side of a coombe that gathered the dusk in its huge green bowl until it brimmed with mystery.
Boy looked down into it and longed, as often before, that she had wings on which to float upon that soft and undulating sea of shadow.
Not seldom this desire was so strong upon her that she felt a certainty she had wings, wings within her which she could not spread, but of the existence of which this insurgent desire was the irrefragable witness.
The sides of the coombe were hung with beeches sheathed now in tenderest green; while from out of the emptiness beneath, the insistent and melancholy cry of lambs seemed to make the shadows quiver and touched a chord of wistfulness in the heart of the girl.
The sun was already sinking behind the smooth ramparts of the hills and rose to meet them as they climbed, peering at them over the summit through the shaggy eyebrow of the gorse.
Boy walked beside the old mare, throwing every now and then swift and surreptitious glances at her new treasure. She was fearful lest the young man leading his pony on the foot-track at her side should think her a baby and over-keen.
Once only he spoke to her, and that clearly with the difficulty of the shy.
"What shall you cuc-call her?" he asked.
"I don't know," she answered.
She longed to help him, but when the chance came she could only snub him. That was always the way with Boy, when she was in touch with somebody she liked.
Old Mat came unconsciously to the rescue.
"Why, Four Pound, o' course," he panted, labouring up the hill, his hands on his knees.
"Is she Black Death blood?" asked the young man.
"Yes, she's Black Death all right," answered the old man. "That's the old Pocahontas strain. Jumpers to a gee. You know. Look at them gray hairs at the root of her tail--and that lazy, too! sluttin' along with her nose out and her tongue a-waggin'. They're all like that, Black Deaths are. If you was to let off a bomb under her belly, she wouldn't so much as switch her tail. Couldn't be bothered. Constitutions like hoxes, too." He paused to pant. "If what that feller said was O.K., why then she's worth money, too. Only o' course it ain't. Else he wouldn't ha' said it."
On the top of the Downs, facing the wind that blew straight from the sun sinking over Newhaven into the sea, they paused to breathe. Beneath them stretched the Weald, and the great saucer of Pevensey Bay ringed about with a line of brown sand fringed with foam. Northward was Crowborough Beacon, the Ashdown Forest Ridge, and the hills about Battle Abbey. Southward, and the way of the setting sun, the Downs ran out in huge spurs, line behind line of them, into the shining splendour of the sea, to break off abruptly in the white cliffs of the Seven Sisters. The hills were bare and bleak in their austere yet rounded strength, stripped of trees, clothed only