“Ey! he's his father's awn git,” chimed Reuben. “But that Joe Garth is a merry-begot, I'll swear.”
“Shaf! he hesn't a bit of nater intil him, nowther back nor end. He's now't but riffraff,” said Matthew. Ralph Ray's peril and escape were incidents too unimportant to break the spell of the accident to the body of his father.
Robbie Anderson turned in late in the evening.
“Here's a sorry home coming,” he said as he entered.
It was easy to see that Robbie was profoundly agitated. His eyes were aflame; he rose and sat, walked a pace or two and stood, passed his fingers repeatedly through his short curly beard, slapped his knee, and called again and again for ale. When he spoke of the accident on the fell, he laughed with a wild effort at a forced and unnatural gayety.
“It's all along of my being dintless, so it is,” he muttered, after little Reuben Thwaite had repeated for some fresh batch of inquirers the story, so often told, of how the mare took to flight, and of how Ralph leaped on to the young horse in pursuit of it.
“All along of you, Robbie; how's that, man?”
“If I'd chained the young horse at the bottom of the hill there would have been no mare to run away, none.”
“It's like that were thy orders, then, Robbie?”
“It were that, damn me, it were—the schoolmaster there, he knows it.”