Strickland only laughed—(to this day I cannot imagine what possessed him), and gave Adam the little tap-tap with a riding cane that was whipping sufficient for his years.
When it was all over, Adam said quietly, “I am little and you are big. If I had stayed among my horse-folk I should not have been whipped. You are afraid to go there.”
The merest chance led me to Strickland’s house that afternoon. When I was half-way down the drive Adam passed me without recognition, at a fast run. I caught one glimpse of his face under his big hat, and it was the face of his father as I had once seen it in the grey of the morning when it bent over a leper. I caught the child by the shoulder.
“Let me go!” he screamed; though he and I were the best of friends, as a rule. “Let me go!”
“Where to, Father Adam?” He was quivering like a haltered colt.
“To the well. I have been beaten. I have been beaten before a woman! Let me go!” He tried to bite my hand.
“That is a small matter,” I said. “Men are born to beatings.”
“Thou hast never been beaten,” he said savagely (we were talking in the native tongue).
“Indeed I have; times past counting.”
“Before women?”