g. Yet he never spoke. He
turned again to the horses. They seemed to understand him, to prick
up alert.

"This is mine," he said, with his hand on the neck of the old
thoroughbred. It was a bay with a white blaze.

"I think he's nice," she said. "He seems so sensitive."

"In England," he answered suddenly, "horses live a long time,
because they _don't_ live--never alive--see? In England
railway-engines are alive, and horses go on wheels." He smiled into
her eyes as if she understood. She was a trifle nervous as he smiled
at her from out of the stable, so yellow-eyed and half-mysterious,
derisive. Her impulse was to turn and go away from the stable. But a
deeper impulse made her smile into his face, as she said to him:

"They like you to touch them."

"Who?" His eyes kept hers. Curious how _dark_ they seemed, with only
a yellow ring of pupil. He was looking right into her, beyond her
usual self, impersonal.

"The horses," she said. She was afraid of his long, cat-like look.
Yet she felt convinced of his ultimate good-nature. He seemed to her
to be the only passionately good-natured man she had ever seen. She
watched him vaguely, with strange vague trust, implicit belief in
him. In him--in what?

That afternoon the colliers trooping home in the winter afternoon
were rejoiced with a spectacle: Kishwegin, in her deerskin, fringed
gaiters and fringed frock of deerskin, her long hair down her back,
and with marvellous cloths and trappings on her steed, riding
astride on a tall white horse, followed by Max in chieftain's robes
and chieftain's long head-dress of dyed feathers, then by the others
in war-paint and feathers and brilliant Navajo blankets. They
carried bows and spears. Ciccio was without his blanket, naked to
the waist, in war-paint, and brandishing a long spear. He dashed up
from the rear, saluted the chieftain with his arm and his spear on
high as he swept past, suddenly drew up his rearing steed, and
trotted slowly back again, making his horse perform its paces. He
was extraordinarily velvety and alive on horseback.

Crowds of excited, shouting children ran chattering along the
pavements. The colliers, as they tramped grey and heavy, in an
intermittent stream uphill from the low grey west, stood on the
pavement in wonder as the cavalcade approached and passed, jingling
the silver bells of its trappings, vibrating the wonderful colours
of the barred blankets and saddle cloths, the scarlet wool of the
a