LUSSHA SINFIELD.
RICHARD HOGGEN had grinned with much interest over this brief dialogue, and accompanied William with right goodwill, as he made his search for the man with the horses.
Coming round the corner of a booth suddenly, a tall bony slender fellow, riding a chestnut horse and leading a gray, was before them.
He was a handsome young man, very swarthy, with oval face, lowering forehead, black eyes, and black hair; about his neck, in a single tie, so that its ends hung loose and long, was that green-and-red handkerchief which he had noted in the description. He wore a wideawake hat, a gray coat with gilt buttons, a good deal worn at the seams, a red waistcoat, white corduroy knee-breeches, and brown leather gaiters.
William made a step forward and raised his hand; the man pulled up.
“Selling that gray?” asked William.
“Ay — d’ye like him?” said the man. “Can’t say till I look at him. Old Cowper told me I should find you about here. You’re Lussha Sinfield, ain’t you?”
“Ay,” said the man, boldly, but he eyed them suspiciously. “I’m the man. All the world’s welcome to look at me, and the horse too. Nothing to hide: he’s a beauty!”
“Has he been hunted?”
“Half last season; a lamb to handle — a devil to run. Jumps all slick — bar, ditch, or stone-wall, all one to Faa; takes all sweet; beautiful trained. Look at his hoofs — just like a marble. Never made a mistake since he was dropped. Pedigree, points, action, training — not another’s been on this turf this six year like him. Try him yourself — you know a horse. Will ye come a bit this way? — and Mister Cowper will hold the chestnut.”
It was really a nice horse, William thought, with fine action. But he was not troubling his head much about horses. His business was of another sort.
“Well, come on, it’s close by,” said William, pointing toward the spot where he had left the old swarthy savage twirling his cudgel.
As they walked on, William Haworth’s companion jogged him under his ribs, and mumbled his critical remarks on the horse, into his ear: a caution upon this point, a hint upon that, but a general admission that “the beast was no’ that bad.” And all the time the horseman, with his lids dropped, as if he was looking at the grass at his horse’s hoof, was reading, through the long fringe of his eyelashes, with a practised skill, the countenances and bearing of these two friends, and he truly saw in William’s that which dissatisfied and even alarmed him.
But Lussha Sinfield knew very well how he stood. “He need not care a curse for any one.” He had little secrets, of course, of his own — something more than most men, but they were secrets. There was nothing that could turn up about him. “He did not care a d — n.”
Cowper was now in sight, and he beckoned to him.
“Take the halter,” said he quietly, and Cowper — than whom, as I have said, no fitter representative for the forest-demon in “Der Freyschütz” ever strode on earth — took the rope in his hand.
William Haworth was standing a little away, so as to take in the whole figure of the horse.
“He stands over his knees,” says William.
“A good judge would think that a perfection, rather than otherwise,” answered Sinfield, coolly.
“I take leave to think differently,” says William, sharply.
“Every man to his taste,” says the dealer, coolly.
“And, besides that, I think his shoulder too straight for a hunter, and his hindlegs too far away from him.”
“If those points were better than they are,” answers the man, with a scornful smile, “I’d be asking a hatful more than ninety pounds for him. But never mind that — the proof of the pudding is in the eating. You’d better see him over a few fences.”
“I don’t mind,” says the Squire.
“Hollo, Jonnie!” cries the man, raising his arm, and a slight boy, black-eyed and black-haired, with dark-brown skin, runs up to his side.
“That’s a gypsy lad,” says Dick Hoggen, struck by the peculiar physique of the boy.
“By my soul, he’s not!” answers Sinfield, fiercely. “That’s a clever boy, though. Now, Jonnie, take him over that bar.”
A few steps brought them to the bar. The little fellow sits light as a fly on the horse’s back, and, without fuss or excitement, the horse goes over.
“That will do; and what do you say to that double ditch?” says William, pointing to the fence of the fair-green close by them.
“Take him over that,” says Lussha Sinfield to the boy, and the horse goes over the fence.
“What do you say to that? You saw how he changes his legs,” said the dealer.
“He goes out of his tracks,” says William.
The man answers with a derisive laugh.
“Take him over that again,” he says, and over goes the horse.
“Bring the horse down here a bit, to the wall,” says Sinfield. “Now take him over the wall for the Squire.”
And over the wall he goes.
“See that!” cries Sinfield.
“What?” says the Squire.
“What!” echoes Sinfield. “Why, how he stands out, and sails over it. What! Ha — ha!”
“I say it’s bad jumping,” says William, coolly; “why, he runs under and bucks over. A hunter, you say!”
“That gentleman there,” says Sinfield, pointing to Dick, and beginning to lose temper, “has an eye in his head, and knows what belongs to a horse. What do you say, sir?”
Dick screwed one eye close, and looked hard at the horse with the other. The dealer was on the point of citing the old distich: “Who winks with one eye and looks with the other, I would not trust him though he were my brother.”
He did not quite know what to make of them, so, on the whole, he chose to try a little longer.
“Take him over the wall again,” said Sinfield. And over went the gray, as before.
“Will ye try him?”
“I don’t mind,” answered William.
He mounts, and excited the horse with whip and spur, and gallops him round the empty upper end of the green, and pulls him up suddenly before the seller, who is growing angry.
“What the d — l do you mean by bucketing my horse about that way?”
“D — n it! you asked me to try him, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t tell you to drive him mad, and knock him about that lick — did I? And what do you say to him, after all that? — what do you say now?”