She pulled a green apple from a bough that hung over a stone wall and with this in her hand she came close to the pasture fence and whistled a peculiar call. It was answered by a low whinny and a soft thud of hoofs, and a golden-chestnut hunter thrust a long nose over the bars, flaring flame-lined nostrils to the touch of her hand. She laid her cheek against the white thoroughbred forehead and held the apple to the eager reaching lip, with several teasing withdrawings before she gave it to its juicy crunching.
“No, Selim,” she said as the wide nostrils snuffled over her shoulder, the begging breath blowing warm against her neck. “No more—and no sugar to-day. Sugar has gone up two cents a pound.”
She let down the top bar of the fence and vaulting over, ran to a stable and presently emerging with a saddle on her arm, whistled the horse to her and saddled him. Then opening the gate, she mounted and cantered down the lane to meet the oncoming riders—a kindly-faced, middle-aged man, a younger one with dark features and coal-black hair, and two girls.
Chisholm Lusk spurred in advance and lifted his hat. “I held up the judge, Shirley,” he said, “and made him bring me along. He tells me there’s a fox-hunt on to-morrow; may I come?”
“Pshaw! Chilly,” said the judge. “I don’t believe you ever got up at five o’clock in your born days. You’ve learned bad habits abroad.”
“You’ll see,” he answered. “If my man Friday doesn’t rout me out to-morrow, I’ll be up for murder.”
They rode an hour, along stretches of sunny highways or on shaded bridle-paths where the horses’ hoofs fell muffled in brown pine-needles and drooping branches flicked their faces. Then, by a murky way gouged with brusk gullies, across shelving fields and “turn-rows” in a long détour around Powhattan Mountain, a rough spur in the shape of an Indian’s head that wedged itself forbiddingly between the fields of springing corn and tobacco. They approached the Red Road again by a crazy bridge whose adze-hewn flooring was held in place by wild grape-vines and weighted down against cloudburst and freshet by heavy boulders till it dipped its middle like an overloaded buckboard in the yellow waters of the sluggish stream beneath. On the farther side they pulled down to breathe their horses. Here the road was like a narrow ruler dividing a desert from a promised land. On one hand a guttered slope of marl and pebbles covered with a tatterdemalion forest—on the other acre upon acre of burnished grain.
“Ah never saw such a frowsley-looking thing in mah life,” said Betty Page, in her soft South Carolinian drawl that was all vowels and liquids, “as that wild hill beside those fields. For all the world like a disgraceful tramp leering across the wall at a dandy.”
Shirley applauded the simile, and the judge said, “This is a boundary. That hobo-landscape is part of the deserted Valiant estate. The hill hides the house.”
She nodded. “Damory Court. It’s still vacant, Ah suppose.”