Then I thought of Ward, and something fluttered in my throat. He was under the spell of this slim, brown-haired witch. She was in his blood, running to his finger-tips. She was on him like the sun. Why could not the woman see what the good God was handing down to her? It was the treasure worth a kingdom. Did she think to find this thing at any crossroads? Oh, she would see. She would see. This thing was found rarely by the luckiest, so rarely that many an old wise man held that there was no such treasure under the sun, and the quest of it was but a fool's errand.

I was a mile behind the drove, and when I came up it had reached the borders of Woodford's land. Jud had thrown down the high fence, staked-and-ridered with long chestnut rails, and the stream of cattle was pouring through and spreading out over the great pasture. I watched the little groups of muleys strike out through the deep broom-sedge hollows and the narrow bulrush marshes and the low gaps of the good sodded hills, spying this new country, finding where the grass was sweetest and where the water bubbled in the old poplar trough, and what wind-sheltered cove would be warmest to a fellow's belly when he lay sleeping in the sun.

Then we rode north through the Hills, over the Gauley where the oak leaves carpeted the ford, and the little trout darted like a beam of light, and the old fish-hawk sat on the hanging limb of the dead beech-tree with his shoulders to his ears and his beak drooping, like some worn-out voluptuary brooding on his sins.

On we went through the deep wooded lanes where the redbird stepped about in his long crimson coat, jerring at the wren, who worked in the deep thicket as though the Master Builder had gone away to kingdom come and left her behind to finish the world.

We came to many a familiar landmark of my golden babyhood, the enchanted grove on the Seely Hill where I had hunted fabled monsters and gone whooping down among the cattle, the Greathouse meadow where Red Mike pitched me out of the saddle when he grew tired of having his bit jerked, and I sat up in my little petticoats and solemnly demanded that Jourdan should cut his head off, a thing the old man promised on his sacred honour when he could borrow the ax of the man in the moon; the high gate-post by the cattle-scales where I perched bareheaded in a calico dress and watched old Bedford make his last fight against human government, Bedford, a bull of mysterious notions, that would kill you if he found you walking in his field, and lick your stirrup if you came riding on a horse.




Most Popular