“Young Hickling,” said Chard. “No, me lord, I should call him very adecuado — with his horses.”
“How do you go on with him?”
“Well, me lord, bearing in mind what you said to me at the outset, we haven’t had a batalla campal,but that ain’t to say we won’t, because one of these days I shall catch him a bofetada,and then we’ll have a real turn-up.”
“Why?”
“Because,” said Chard frankly, “it’s his idea that everything has got to be the way Mr. Martin wants it, and that ain’t by any means my idea. I daresay if I was as meek as what he’d like me to be we should have to stable our horses in a cow-byre no one don’t happen to be using.” Without moving his eyes from the road ahead, he added: “ No se moleste usted! as they used to say to us in Spain, whenever anything went wrong. I can handle young Hickling, me lord. The trouble with him is he’s kind of growed up alongside of Mr. Martin, and, like every Johnny Raw you ever saw, he hasn’t got many notions in his silly head that came there natural, as you might say. Put there, they were, though it ain’t for me to say who put them there.”
The Earl did not reply for a minute; when he did speak it was in his usual soft, untroubled voice. Chard, straining his ears to catch a note in it of comprehension, or even of anger, could detect none. “Continue to handle him, Chard — without a pitched battle, if you please.”
“No objection to me keeping my eyes open, me lord?”
“None. But don’t mistake shadows for the enemy!”
“I have been posted as vedette in my time, me lord,” said Chard. “They didn’t, so to say, encourage us to give the alarm when a hare hopped across the path.”
The Earl only smiled, so his slightly offended henchman relapsed into correct silence.