"Hadn't I better come with you, Miss?" inquired Lewis anxiously.
Lloyd shook her head. "No, indeed," she said decisively.
Rox, after vindicating his own independence by the proper amount of showing off, started away down the road with as high an action as he could command, playing to the gallery, looking back and out of the tail of his eye to see if Lewis observed what a terrible fellow he was that morning.
"Well, of all the critters!" commented Mrs. Applegate from the porch. But Charley-Joe, with an almost hypnotic fixity in his yellow eyes, and who during the last few minutes had several times opened his mouth wide in an ineffectual attempt to mew, suddenly found his voice with a prolonged and complaining note.
"Well, heavens an' airth, take your fish, then!" exclaimed Mrs. Applegate suddenly, remembering the cat. "An' get off'n my porch with it." She pushed him away with the side of her foot, and Charley-Joe, with the fish's head in his teeth, retired around the corner of the house by the rain barrel, where at intervals he could be heard growling to himself in a high-pitched key, pretending the approach of some terrible enemy.
Meanwhile Lloyd, already well on her way, was having an exciting tussle with Rox. The horse had begun by making an exhibition of himself for all who could see, but in the end he had so worked upon his own nerves that instead of frightening others he only succeeded in terrifying himself. He was city-bred, and the sudden change from brick houses to open fields had demoralised him. He began to have a dim consciousness of just how strong he was. There was nothing vicious about him. He would not have lowered himself to kick, but he did want, with all the big, strong heart of him, to run.
But back of him there—he felt it thrilling along the tense-drawn reins—was a calm, powerful grip, even, steady, masterful. Turn his head he could not, but he knew very well that Lloyd had taken a double twist upon the reins, and that her hands, even if they were gloved in white, were strong—strong enough to hold him to his work. And besides this—he could tell it by the very feel of the bit—he knew that she did not take him very seriously, that he could not make her afraid of him. He knew that she could tell at once whether he shied because he was really frightened or because he wanted to break the shaft, and that in the latter case he would get the whip—and mercilessly, too—across his haunch, a degradation, above all things, to be avoided. And she had called him an old pig once already that morning.
Lloyd drove on. She keenly enjoyed this struggle between the horse's strength and her own determination, her own obstinacy. No, she would not let Rox have his way; she would not allow him to triumph over her for a single moment. She would neither be forced nor tricked into yielding a single point however small. She would be mistress of the situation.
By the end of half an hour she had him well in hand, and was bowling smoothly along a level stretch of road at the foot of an abrupt rise of land covered with scrub oak and broken with outcroppings of granite of a curious formation. Just beyond here the road crossed the canal by a narrow—in fact, a much too narrow—plank bridge without guard-rails. The wide-axled dog-cart had just sufficient room on either hand, and Lloyd, too good a whip to take chances with so nervous a horse as Rox, drew him down to a walk as she approached it. But of a sudden her eyes were arrested by a curious sight. She halted the cart.
At the roadside, some fifty yards from the plank bridge, were two dogs. Evidently there had just been a dreadful fight. Here and there a stone was streaked with blood. The grass and smaller bushes were flattened out, and tufts of hair were scattered about upon the ground. Of the two dogs, Lloyd recognised one upon the instant. It was Dan, the "liver'n white" fox-hound of the farmhouse—the fighter and terror of the country. But he was lying upon his side now, the foreleg broken, or rather crushed, as if in a vise; the throat torn open, the life-blood in a great pool about his head. He was dead, or in the very throes of death. Poor Dan, he had fought his last fight, had found more than his match at last.