One ear pasted flat on her mane, she stood impatiently still while he reached for the chamois blanket and swaddled the Negro baby in it.
Only then was he able to remount her.
Another of the colony's lurking evils, the desertion—often the murder of illegitimate Negro babes.
O God—another of the island's depraved nigger curses!
All the way up the hill Rayside reared and trotted, kicked and pranced, keeping to the edge of the marl road.
And the Negro waif's bird-like claws dug deeper into the buckra's shirt bosom.
He rode up the hill's moon-white crest until the shadow of Waterford fell upon him. He was tired, his brain fagged, his legs sore, his nerves on edge.
On the brink of a rocky hill extending beyond the estate stood a buckra overseer's cabin. Here Bellon's journey ended. He stabled the mare in the shed, glad to be rid of her. "Why, you don't even give me a chance to be temperamental—"
He took the Negro child in the cabin, angry at the physical proximity of it. "If any one had told me three weeks ago that after dodging Boer-shot I'd next be mothering a deserted nigger ragamuffin at two o'clock in the morning on a West Indian country road, I'd certainly have called him a God damned liar!"