Eventually, and not too much so, they left the city streets, and soon were jogging down a winding little lane of the softest, yellowest earth imaginable. On either side, between the edge of the roadside and the snake rail fence, was a little bank all a-tangle with blackberry bushes, and here and there, with its roots protruding out into space, a gaunt and bare thorn tree or an occasional walnut thrusting its branches over the road. Beyond, the fields lay in cool, serrated rows, deep brown and freshly fragrant. The woodland which hung about in the background beyond the fields would occasionally sweep down and cross the road, and then would come a stretch of checkered shade on the yellow earth, and the lifting, expectant sound of high wind in top branches. And sometimes, in the heart of such an arm of woodland, the old horse's hoofs would echo hollow on the warped and mellowing boards of a tiny bridge, and there would be a momentary slip and gurgle of water underneath, on down through the ferns. Joe felt steeped in calm.
Mr. Montgomery was not at home. Nor were the horses. They found they were a week late. An old Negro whom they encountered just within the paddock gate so informed them: "Yessuh. They done took 'em down t' Louisville, las' Monday."
They left him scratching his kinky gray pate in meditation.
Uncle Buzz was disappointed. The little excursion was thus deprived of its sparkle. There was a something about going out to see racehorses——Well, at any rate, Uncle Buzz was disappointed. He showed it on the way home. Perhaps the fading sunlight, the lengthening shadows, had something to do with it. And the wind, too, that had come with the morning and kept up its bluster all day, had died to a whisper, so that a cluster of last year's corn-stalks standing in a fence corner were merely indifferently waggling. It may have been just a reflection of mood, but as they were rounding the brow of the hill above Bloomfield and could see the dip of the meadows to the creek and the white fences and outbuildings of the Fair Grounds away off to the right, the old horse stopped and gently switched his tail. And Uncle Buzz let him stop.
"Do you know," he said, and his voice was reminiscent and uncertain, "I've been thinking lately we ought to sell the place and move to town."
Joe looked up at him curiously. "Why do you think that, Uncle Buzz?"
Mr. Mosby pondered, as the horse, feeling perhaps the slight pricks of conscience, resumed his way at an imperceptible walk. "Well," he said, "this country is not what it used to be. All the other towns, Guests, Fillmore—all the rest of them—are on the railroad or interurban. They have the advantage of us."
Joe was watching him unperceived. The old man's face had lost its aggressive jauntiness. There was an odd pucker about the brows. His mouth, above the well-trimmed goatee, seemed small and indecisive. Joe could see the clear blue veins on the back of the hand as it listlessly held the lines.
"Business has been a bit slack this past year. Seems like it never got over the war. And prices are high, too. Can't get a nigger to do a day's work for you for less than three dollars now," he added fiercely. And then lapsing into his former vein again, "I wonder——"
Joe waited. "Wonder what, Uncle Buzz?"