“We shall be true friends—that we shall!”
“How can that be—between a little boy like you, and a grown man like me?”
“By me being good.”
“By both of us being good—no other way. If one of us only was good, we could never be true friends. I must be good as well as you, else we shall never understand each other!”
“How kind you are, Mr. Grant! You treat me just like another one!” said Davie.
“But we must not forget that I am the big one and you the little one, and that we can’t be the other one to each other except the little one does what the big one tells him! That’s the way to fit into each other.”
“Oh, of course!” answered Davie, as if there could not be two minds about that.
CHAPTER XV.
HORSE AND MAN.
During the first day and the next, Donal did not even come in sight of any other of the family; but on the third day, after their short early school—for he seldom let Davie work till he was tired, and never after—going with him through the stable-yard, they came upon lord Forgue as he mounted his horse—a nervous, fiery, thin-skinned thoroughbred. The moment his master was on him, he began to back and rear. Forgue gave him a cut with his whip. He went wild, plunging and dancing and kicking. The young lord was a horseman in the sense of having a good seat; but he knew little about horses; they were to him creatures to be compelled, not friends with whom to hold sweet concert. He had not learned that to rule ill is worse than to obey ill. Kings may be worse than it is in the power of any subject to be. As he was raising his arm for a second useless, cruel, and dangerous blow, Donal darted to the horse’s head.
“You mustn’t do that, my lord!” he said. “You’ll drive him mad.”