The McBrides | Page 3

the
wean I would leave a kiss on your bonny red mouth."
Round the pupils of her black eyes a little ring began to glow, as
though a light came from a great distance through darkness, her white
teeth bit on her under lip, and she stepped closer to Dan's horse.
"Haud 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