The McBrides | Page 3

away, woman, haud away, for the love o' your Maker; the stallion canna thole weemen about him."
I fear me the town had taken some of the game out of me, for when I saw the big dark horse flatten his ears, the wicked eyes rolling, and the great fore-hoofs drumming on the road, ready to leap and batter the woman and her bairn to a bloody pulp fornent me, my stomach turned, as we say, and I felt sick and giddy. Many a morning had I stood at the loose-box door and watched the devil in the horse and the devil in the man battle for mastery, and aye the horse was cowed. Even on the mornings when I heard Dan's step, soft and wary on the cobbles, before the sun was up, and knew by the look of him, and the gruffness in his voice, that he had travelled many a weary mile from his light-o'-love, and that sleep had not troubled him, I would hear the stable door opening and Dan whistling like the cheery early bird as he opened the corn-kist. After the morning feed the battle began, for Chieftain had a devil, but I think Dan had seven of that ilk.
"It's him or me, Hamish," he would croon, "him or me, but I'm likin' myself a' the time"; and he kept the lathering, plunging devil off himself, whiles with his fists, and whiles with a short stick.
"I'll handle him were he twice as big and twice as bad. I'll hae nae gentlemen among the horse when there's lea to plough!" and the fight would go on. But Dan was the only man who could handle Chieftain, and there seemed a kind of laughing comradeship between them.
I have digressed that you might see with my eyes the queer uncanny thing that happened on the road there between the woman and the horse. I have told you the spaewife--if spaewife you would call her, for I think sorceress fitted her better--I have said she came close to Chieftain's head, her black eyes fairly lowing; and as the brute, his skin twitching, gathered himself to rear on her, she hit him full on the mouth with her little brown hand, and hissed a word at him in her own tongue. As the word struck my ears I felt myself tingle to my finger-tips, and the world seemed to go quiet all round me. The horse's ears went forward, and he stretched his great neck, and there he was quiet as an old pony, nibbling with his lips at the woman's shawl and hair.
And the woman looked at Dan.
A kind of half laugh, half sigh, left his lips.
"I wish," said he, "I had your gait o' handlin' horse. It's desperate sudden, but it's sure, as our friend Hamish wid observe. Maybe, my dear, you'll hiv a spell tae turn the horse tae himsel' again and something extra, an' I'm no' sayin' but what I would be likin' him better, for sittin' here on a quate beast that sould be like the ravening devil o' holy writ is no' canny."
"Spell," said the girl, for indeed she was little more, and under her brown skin I could see the darker red rising. "Spell, ye night-hawk!" and her broad bosom heaved with the rage in her, and her body trembled with living anger.
"I come o' folk, ye reiver, that lay down and rose up among their horse, in the black tents, that loved and hated among their horse, that lived and died among their horse, and ye would talk to me o' spells. Did I but say the word to that black horse, not you nor any o' the folk ye cam' crooked among would straddle him and live to boast o' it after."
Dan sat his horse like a statue. It makes my old eyes moist and my throat choky to this day to think of it, for I loved him through everything. Could he have had command of heavy horse, and won his rest on some glorious field, brave, headstrong, devil-may-care Dan; but there he sat and looked on the Cassandra, and his eyes were laughing from his stern face as he took a turn on the rope reins.
"Back, my bonny horse," said he to Chieftain, and there was a kind of joyous lilt in his voice. "Draw away your pair, Hamish, and this lan' horse o' mine. We'll miss our dinner maybe, but I've an unco hankering after this word."
Away down in my heart I knew what was coming, and I watched the woman loosen her tartan shawl and lay her infant in a neuk among the hedge roots.
"I'm waitin' now, my dear," said Dan, "and in case I dee I'll tell ye I think I could break you in, for