“You seem bloody positive about everything, sir,” said Mr. Olding. “Upon my word, I’m beginning to wonder-”
“Mr. Olding, sir! Look behind you!” cried Tom.
They looked round. Advancing towards them from the direction of Tucker’s Barrows was a small man in riding kit. His bowler hat had a dent in the crown, his face was flushed crimson with heat or emotion, or both and he walked as a man will walk who has trudged some distance on a hot day, through thick heather, in top boots; but in all other respects he seemed to be perfectly hale, if not hearty.
“Good God! Percy!” exclaimed Mr. Olding.
CHAPTER VI. At Fault
Are you all right, Percy?” asked Mr. Olding anxiously.
Percy said nothing for a moment. He stood there, in the centre of the little group of mounted men, his red face twitching, his breath coming and going.
“Am I all right?” he burst out finally. “My godfathers! What the hell do you expect me to be? All right! I like that!”
He broke into what was evidently intended to be derisive laughter, but which turned into a fit of coughing.
“This gentleman said you was dead,” said Tom.
“This gentleman,” bellowed Percy, “stole my horse.”
“I did nothing of the sort,” Pettigrew protested.
“If you didn’t, I’d like to know what you’re doing on him now.”
“That at least is easily remedied,” said Pettigrew in as dignified a tone as he could summon up. With an immense effort he lifted a leg which felt like solid wood over the pony’s back and got down to the ground.
“Thank you,” said Percy in a voice heavy with sarcasm and took the pony’s reins.
Pettigrew was about to say something further, but it was clear that for the time being any words would be wasted on Percy. He was fully occupied in trying to get into the saddle. Quite evidently, the pony, which had been meekness itself when Pettigrew mounted it, had a personal dislike to Percy. No sooner was his foot in the stirrup than it began a rapid circular movement with its forelegs for centre and its hindquarters for circumference, leaving a blaspheming Percy to hop uncomfortably after it. Olding came up alongside in an endeavour to help, but his own horse, hitherto perfectly staid, immediately began to plunge and rear, finishing the performance by kicking the pony smartly in the ribs. The spectacle came to an end only when Tom, who had dismounted, walked across and held the pony firmly by the bridle. It should have been funny, Pettigrew reflected, but he was beyond being amused. He could not even muster a smile at the spectacle of Percy, at last in the saddle, trying to control a restive animal with one hand while shortening his stirrup leathers with the other. Everything that had happened since he began his fatal walk towards Bolter’s Tussock had been so completely alien to what he normally knew as real life that he began to wonder whether the whole thing was not a bad dream. Only the aches and pains that now possessed his every limb were actual enough.
“Stole my horse!” Percy repeated. After manoeuvres covering about half an acre of moor he had at last got his mount and tackle under control. “Damn it, I saw him in the act.”
“Did you, by Jove!” said Mr. Olding. “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“Stop him? Look here, I came down just this side of Tucker’s Barrows-the bloody pony got away with me and put his foot in a peat cutting if you want to know. All right. He went on, across the Tussock, just as I knew he would, making for home. Right, Tom?”
“Yassur. He allus does.”
“All right. I knew I’d pick him up at the gate to your field, if not sooner. So I followed on. Right?”
Mr. Olding gravely nodded. Clearly it was all right by him.
“Then the next thing I know, here’s this fellow on the pony, cantering across the top as though the whole place belonged to him. I shouted at him-I waved- and what does he do? Turns round like a flash and rides lickety split down hill as hard as he can go after the hounds. All right. If that isn’t stealing I’d like to know what is.”
“A person steals who, without the consent of the owner…” As a pious man in extremity will say a prayer, so Pettigrew murmured to himself the opening words of the Larceny Act, 1916. The familiar phrases comforted him. Not only did they assure him of his own innocence in law; they represented something solid and substantial to cling to at a moment when he was beginning to doubt the evidence of his senses. He had got to the stage of feeling that if the others went on discussing him as though he wasn’t there, he would soon begin to question his own identity.
“And then,” Olding was saying, “he turns up at the kill with a cock-and-bull story about finding your bleeding carcase with the pony standing over it.”
“All right. That proves it, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, rather, I should say it did.”
“… fraudulently and without a claim of right made in good faith…”
“You’ll give evidence about it, if they want you to?”
“Oh, I say, Percy, that’s going a bit far, isn’t it? I mean, that sort of thing isn’t going to do the Hunt any good, and you’ve got the pony back.”
“All right, if you say so, Olding. It seems a pity to let the blighter off scot free, though. What I can’t get over is his saying I was dead. Such blasted cheek.”
“… takes and carries away anything capable of being stolen…”
“He went on saying it right up to the end. Took me to the very place where he said you’d be. I was led right up the garden path. Absolutely, I can tell you.”
“Extraordinary thing to do. Do you think he’s quite-?”
For the first time the two men seemed to be aware that Pettigrew was listening to their conversation. They did not stop talking, but walked their mounts out of earshot.
“… with intent, at the time of such taking, permanently to deprive the owner thereof,” Pettigrew concluded defiantly. Let anyone suggest he was out of his mind after that!
“Did you say something, sir?”
He looked round. Tom was speaking to him, and speaking, moreover, in a surprisingly friendly tone. Moreover, he was standing at Pettigrew’s elbow and not talking down at him from the vantage point of a saddle.
The fact encouraged Pettigrew to treat him as a man and a brother. At the same time it puzzled him.
“What have you done to your horse?” he asked.
Tom grinned, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Looking past him, Pettigrew saw the horse standing where Tom had left it when he dismounted to help Percy. It was quite motionless, its head up, its ears pricked, looking towards its master as though waiting for orders. “That’s a well-trained animal,” said Pettigrew. “Better behaved than your pony,” he added with a feeble laugh.
“I can’t afford a disobedient animal in my job,” Tom replied. “He’ll stay there all day if I tell him to, and come when he’s called.”
Tired as he was, Pettigrew looked with interest at this equine phenomenon. He was no judge of horseflesh, but he thought it a very plain-looking animal, a stocky dun-coloured beast, with powerful quarters and a distinctly roman nose. He approached it and its ears went flat back on its head while a set of very ugly teeth champed in his direction.
“Don’t go too close,” Tom called out. “He’s not safe with strangers.”
Pettigrew turned back. Tom was vaguely poking about in the heather with his hunting-crop, a look of scepticism on his face.
“Somewhere about here, you thought he was?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Pettigrew. “I don’t know whether you think me mad or not, but there was a man lying here.”
Tom nodded gravely. “ ’Twasn’t Mr. Percy, though,” he remarked.
“Obviously not, if he came down at Tucker’s Barrows. It was someone else.”
“And he’s not there now.”
“And he’s not there now. That’s what’s so extraordinary.”
