The horseman nodded and grinned. "He's all of that, ma'am, but just the same when I first saw him he was pulling a plough—or, rather, he was trying to run away with one. Of course he must of had the breeding somewhere way off. I reckon he's a throw-back, but if I hadn't come along and seen him he'd still be drudging away on a rocky farm in the hills. As it is, he's took blues and reds all through Canada and the East—and I've a notion you're going to ride him out the gate with a championship tie on his brow-band tonight."
As Boone turned away with Anne, the words seemed to ring in his ears: "If I hadn't come along and seen him, he'd still be drudging away on a rocky farm in the hills." It fitted his own case precisely, but it made him think, too. He wondered if the time would ever come when people would look at him in public places and find it hard to realize that his youth had been like that magnificent show horse's colthood—a life close to the clods.
Nothing could have kept Boone Wellver away from the Horse Show that evening, but he went with a self-confessed trepidation hard to conceal. In the wide, barnlike foyer of the building, a vertigo of stage fright obsessed him. Never had he seen such a massed and bewilderingly colourful display of evening dress, nor heard such a confused chorus of bright laughter, light talk and blaring orchestration. In the first dizziness of the impression he had the sense of intruding on Fashion vaunting itself unabashed to the trumpetings of heralds, and there swept back over him the positive pain of diffidence which he had felt that other time, when he stood in the open doorway of Colonel Wallifarro's house and announced that he had come to the party.
Inside, as he forced himself onward, his disquiet increased as the blaze of colour heightened and bloomed in the flower-like tiers of the boxes. The glistening shoulders of women in filmy gowns, the sparkle of jewellery, the flash of silk hats and the nodding of pretty faces, all confused him as dry land things might confuse a fish, and he felt unintentionally impertinent when his sleeve of decent black brushed a soft arm white gloved to the shoulder.
Boone Wellver would have fled incontinently from that place had he not been held there by his anxiety for Anne, which would not be allayed until the ladies' hunters had been judged, the ribbons pinned on the fortunate head-stalls and the exit gates swung open and closed. And the jumping class, with its spectacular dash of danger, was held for the last, as the climax is held for the curtain of the act.
CHAPTER XXIX
But while Boone waited for Anne to come into the ring he made no assiduous search for her in the boxes, because, like many other men whose outward seeming is one of boldness, he was fettered by an inordinate shyness in this heavy atmosphere of the unaccustomed. Later Anne accused him of snubbing her. "You passed right by me a half dozen times," she teased with violet mischief shimmering in her eyes. "You wouldn't even look at me."
"I was plain scared," he made candid admission; "but when you went into the ring I looked at you every minute."
"You're jolly well right you did," she laughed. "You were glued to the rail, tramping down women and small children. Every time I came round I saw you there and your face haunted me like a spirit in purgatory. Your eyes were positively bulging with terror."