‘I’ve a second horse and saddle,’ continued the tall stranger; ‘I generally take a couple when I’m travelling, they’re company for one another, and for me too. So if you are going by Nubba, just you ride this roan horse, and we’ll jog on together.’
Ernest considered for a moment. He had paid de sa personne for over-hasty acquaintanceship. But he could not for a moment distrust the steady eye and truthful visage of the man who made this friendly offer. He was interested, too, in his talk, and deeming him to be of a rank and condition that he could in some way repay for the obligation, he accepted it frankly.
‘Very well,’ he said, ‘I shall be glad to go with you as far as Nubba. I suppose your horse won’t be anything the worse for me and my knapsack.’
‘Not he. We’ll saddle up. I have a good way to go before sundown.’
‘May I ask to whom I am indebted for the accommodation?’ inquired Ernest. ‘My name is Ernest Neuchamp.’
‘Well, Mr.—a—Smith,’ said the stranger, with a slight appearance of hesitation. ‘It don’t much matter about names, except you have to write a cheque or pay a bill. Now then, here’s your horse; he’s quiet, and an out-and-out ambler.’
After walking for several days, it was a pleasant sensation enough when Ernest, a fair horseman and respectable performer in the hunting-field, found himself on the back of a free easy-paced hackney again. The roan horse paced along at a rate which he was obliged to moderate, to avoid shaking his benefactor, whose horse did not walk very brilliantly, into a jelly.
‘This is my morning horse,’ said Mr. Smith, slightly out of breath—though he sat his horse with a peculiar instinctive ease, not alone as if he had been accustomed to a horse all his days, but as if he had been born upon one. ‘When you are going a longish journey, you generally have one clever hack and one not quite so good. Well, what you ought to do is to ride the roughest one in the morning, while you’re fresh, and in the afternoon take the fast or easy one, and you finish the day comfortably.’
‘Indeed,’ said Ernest, ‘that never struck me before; but in England we don’t ride far, and never more than one horse at a time.’
‘Fine country, England,’ said Mr. Smith musingly. ‘I was reading in Hallam’s Middle Ages the other day about these Barons making war upon one another. They must have been a good deal like the squatters here, only they didn’t get fined for assaults at the courts of petty sessions, and they had their own lock-ups, and could put a chap in the logs or in their own cellar, and keep him there. I should like to see England.’