Disloyalty was
certainly abetted by just the extravagant, exaggerated hospitality of
colonial life. Never must the doors of your house be shut; all you had
you were expected to share with any sundowner of fortune who chanced to
stop at your gate.
The mare shied with a suddenness that almost unseated him: the next
moment she had the bit between her teeth and was galloping down the
road. Clomp-clomp-clomp went her hoofs on the baked clay; the dust
smothered and stung, and he was holding for all he was worth to reins
spanned stiff as iron. On they flew; his body hammered the saddle; his
breath came sobbingly. But he kept his seat; and a couple of miles
farther on he was down, soothing the wild-eyed, quivering, sweating
beast, whose nostrils worked like a pair of bellows. There he stood,
glancing now back along the road, now up at the sky. His hat had gone
flying at the first unexpected plunge; he ought to return and look for
it. But he shrank from the additional fatigue, the delay in reaching
home this would mean. The sky was still overcast: he decided to risk it.
Knotting his handkerchief he spread it cap-wise over his head and got
back into the saddle.
Mine own familiar friend! And more than that: he could add to David's
plaint and say, my only friend. In Purdy the one person he had been
intimate with passed out of his life. There was nobody to take the
vacant place. He had been far too busy of late years to form new
friendships: what was left of him after the day's work was done was but
a kind of shell: the work was the meaty contents.
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