“Is this the horse?” Hi asked.
“No,” Bright Tooth said, “the other.”
The other was a sour-coloured pony engaged at that minute in gnawing off the top of the partition between the stalls. He was doing this with an ugly chucklehead screwed sideways, so that his yellow hooked teeth might get a purchase on the splinter. He was rough-haired, having been out in the rains (apparently in a hog wallow). The hair, stuck to patches of mud, was scaling off him. He had not been shod nor had his feet been pared. They stuck forward in long, splitting growths of horn almost like slippers. A sort of gaiter of hard red mud coated his legs to his hocks. He was straight-shouldered, and what old Bill always called “a bit goosey in the rump.” His head, when he ceased from gnawing the barrier, was loutish and ill set on. “Stunsail ears and a Roman nose,” Hi thought. “Worth six bob a corner.”
“This is a horse,” Bright Tooth said.
“Ay, in the catalogue ye go for horse,” Hi quoted to himself, from the Macbeth his form had “done” the term before. “Good Lord,” he said aloud, “I can’t take a beast like that.”
“There, a lovely horse,” Bright Tooth said. “Never fail. He never, never fail. There come soldiers here for horses, one time. They say, he too small, not allowed to take so small a horse; but that the horse for a soldier; he got the good guts.”
“Guts. Good Lord,” Hi said. “He’s got no more guts than a herring. I never saw such a beast in all my born days. Let me have the other, the mare.”
“No, not,” Bright Tooth said. “The other one not belong here. She not our horse.”
“Whose is she? Perhaps I could hire her.”
“No, no,” Bright Tooth said, “she wait here till after the fiesta; then the man come to ride her home. He be here in a few minutes now.”