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 added. But Bayard paid him no heed He turned from the gate, the stallion swept its regal gaze 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’llkill him. You,Sartoris!”
MacCallum drew a wad of bills enclosed by a rubber band from his hip pocket “Let him be,” he repeated “That’s what he wants.”
The trader glanced at the 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, and the negro crouched against its shoulder and his crooning chant rose to a swifter beat Then 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, whitefolks,” he said hurriedly. “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’s whole body soared like a bronze explosion. But Bayard had dodged beneath the sabring hooves and as the horse swirled the myriad flicking tongues of its glittering coat 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 hisbody 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 still it stood with lowered head and rolling eyes, rippling its burnished coat into quivering tongues of flame before exploding again.
The beast burst like unfolding bronze wings: a fluid desperation; 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 before 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 turning into the lane: these reared madly before the wild slack-jawed face of the white man in the wagon, and again Bayard dragged his thunderbolt around and headed it away from the square. Down the lane behind him, through the dust the spectators ran, shouting, 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 side he swung the animal into another street that broke suddenly upon his vision. This was a quieter street; soon they would be in the country and the stallion could exhaust its rage without the added hazards of motors and pedestrians. Voices faded behind himinto the thunder of shod hooves: “Runaway! Runaway!” but this street was deserted save for a small automobile going in the same direction, and further along beneath the slumbrous tunnel of the trees, bright small spots of color scuttled out of the street and clotted on one side. 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 pungent sharpness of rage and energy and heat like smoke from the animal’s body, and he swept past the motor car, remarking for a flashing second a woman’s face and a mouth partly open and two eyes round with a serene astonishment. But the face flashed away without registering on his mind and he saw the children, small taut shapes of fear in bright colors, and on the other side of the street a negro man playing a hose onto the sidewalk, and beside him a second negro with a pitchfork.
Someone screamed from a neighboring veranda, and the group of children broke, shrieking; a small figure in a white shirt and diminutive pale blue pants darted from the curb into the street, and Bayard leaned forward and dragged at the rope, swerving the beast toward the opposite sidewalk, where the two negroes stood. The small figure came on, flashed safely behind, then rushing green beneath the stallion’s feet; a tree trunk like a wheel spoke in reverse, and the animal struck clashing fire from wet concrete, slipped, lunged, then crashed down; and for Bayard, a red shock, then blackness. The horse scrambled to its feet and whirled and struck viciously at the prone rider with its forefeet, but the negro with
6
They gathered him up and brought him to town in a commandeered motor car and roused Dr. Peabody from slumber. Dr. Peabody profanely bandaged Bayard’s unconscious head and, when he came to, gave him a drink from the bottle which resided in the littered waste basket and threatened to telephone Miss Jenny if Bayard didn’t go straight home. Rafe MacCallum promised to see that he went, and the owner of the impressed automobile offered to drive him. It was a Ford body with, in place of a tonneau, a miniature one-room cabin of sheet iron and larger than a dog kennel, in each painted geometrical window of which a painted housewife simpered benignantly above a painted sewing machine, and into which 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 young skill as they rattled sedately out of town on the valley road.
The drink Dr. Peabody had given him, instead of quieting his jangled nervous system, rolled sluggishly and hotly in his stomach and served only to nauseate him a little, and against his closed eyelids red antic shapes rolled in throbbing and tedious cycles. He watched them dully and without astonishment as they emerged from blackness and whirled sluggishlyand consumed themselves and reappeared, each time a Hole fainter as his mind cleared And yet, somewhere blended with them, yet at the same time apart and beyond them with a serene aloofness and steadfast among their senseless-convolutions, was a head with twin dark wings of hair. It seemed to have some relation to the instant itself as it culminated in crashing blackness; at the same time it seemed, for all its aloofness, to be a part of the whirling ensuing chaos which now enveloped him; a part of it, yet bringing into the vortex a sort of constant coolness like a faint, shady breeze. So it remained, aloof and not quite distinct, while the coiling shapes faded into a dull unease of physical pain from the jolting of the car, leaving about him like an echo that cool serenity and something more—a sense of shrinking yet fascinated distaste, of which he or something he had done, was the object.
It was getting well into evening. On either hand cotton and corn showed in green spears upon the rich, dark soil, and in the patches of green woodland doves called moodily. After a time Suratt turned from the highway into a faint; rutted wagon road between a field and a patch of woods and they drove straight into the sun, and Bayard held his hat before his face.
