The McBrides | Page 5

The horse, panting and grunting at every breath, had breenged to the knowe on the roadside, and still the knotted rein fell; and then with a mighty plunge he reared up, balanced an instant on hind-legs, and then crashed backwards and lay, and I felt my heart give a mighty beat as Dan sprang on the brute's head and lay there, horse and man done.
"Come, you," snarled the man, as though he spoke to a dog; and the girl went to him.
"Quate the brute," said he, "for he's trimmlin' sair, and I like his temper a' the better for no' bein' broken."
"Ay, I'll quate the brute, easy as I wid yoursel'."
You may think you know a man till something happens, and you find him a stranger, and so I found, for at her words the man sprang to his feet as she soothed the horse.
"Say ye so," said he, and took her by the shoulder--"say ye so. I've broken many a horse afore this ane, and, Belle, I'll break you," and I watched the swarthy flush rise on the girl's face, and looked at the man's eyes and saw the reason of it.
"Wheest, lad, wheest," she cried; "let me go to the wean."
"Wean--ye never had a wean. . . ."
And then she did a queer thing. She bent her dark head till I could not see her eyes, but only the smooth eyelids and dark lashes, and she put her little brown hand over the man's eyes and stood a picture of humility, with a sad little smile on her face.
"Don't break me . . . yet," she murmured, and I saw Dan kiss her hand as she slid it down over his lips, and her face brightened like a flower in sunlight.
And there were the horses, rugging at the hedge where I had tethered them; and Chieftain on his feet, shaky and foam-flecked, and trembling at his knees; and the gipsy lass's wean greetin' at the hedge foot, with one wee bare arm clear of the shawl, seeming to beckon all the world to its aid.
And Belle the gipsy lass lifted the child and wrapped her in the shawl, and took the road in front of us. I had mind of Belle when she was the bonniest lass among a wheen of black-avised Eastern folk, that camped for many's the year on the ground of Scaurdale, where my uncle's friend, John o' Scaurdale, farmed land; but I was not prepared for her strange powers on horse, or for the beauty of her, and I think Dan was of my way of thinking also, for at the stable door says he: "I think, Hamish, a fee from John o' Scaurdale would not be such a bad thing with a lass like Belle to be seeing in the gloaming."
[1] Ires--"flags."
[2] Costly apparel.
CHAPTER II.
MAKES SOME MENTION OF ONE JOCK McGILP, AND TELLS HOW BELLE BROUGHT THE WEAN IN THE TARTAN SHAWL INTO THE HOUSE OF NOURN.
Nourn was home to me in my holidays and vacations from the college, and here I was back again for good, having become Magister Artium and well acquainted with the plane-stanes and glaber of the town of Glasgow--back again to the green countryside on my uncle's land of Nourn, concerned more about horses and cattle beasts than with the Arts, and with enough siller left me by my parents to be able to follow my inclinations.
My uncle--the Laird of Nourn, as he was called--had married kind of late, a common habit where the years bring strength and not eld; and Dan, his brother Ewan the soldier's son, had been at Nourn since he could creep, being early left an orphan.
On the Sunday after the coming of Belle the gipsy I lay long abed. In those days my cousin Dan and I made a practice of sleeping above the horses, "to be near them," as Dan said; but for myself I aye thought it would be that he might the easier slip out at night, and in again in the morning, and nobody the wiser.
In the years I would be at the college Dan had become airt and pairt of every wildness in the countryside, and in these times every man with red blood in him was concerned with the smuggling or the distilling of whisky,--and that is the reason that mothers were wishful that their sons should be able to "take a horse by the head and a boat by the helm," for these would be very needful attributes in a handy lad.
And lying there in bed I minded how I once fell in with Jock McGilp, the captain of the smuggler Seagull, a man that sailed the Gull like a witch, and cracked his fingers at the Revenue cutters, and this was the way of it.
When