“Only that we are to have a wolf-hunt in the plains to-morrow; and if you’ve aggravated your father, he’ll be taking you home to-night, that’s all.”
“Oh! no fear of that,” said Charley, with a look that seemed to imply that there was very great fear of “that”—much more, in fact, than he was willing to admit even to himself. “My dear old father never keeps his anger long. I’m sure that he’ll be all right again in half-an-hour.”
“Hope so, but doubt it I do,” said Harry, making another deadly poke at the fire, and returning, with a deep sigh, to his stool.
“Would you like to go with us, Charley?” said the senior clerk, laying down his pen and turning round on his chair (the senior clerk never sat on a stool) with a benign smile.
“Oh, very, very much indeed,” cried Charley; “but even should father agree to stay all night at the fort, I have no horse, and I’m sure he would not let me have the mare after what I did to-day.”
“Do you think he’s not open to persuasion?” said the senior clerk.
“Well, well, it don’t much signify; perhaps we can mount you.” (Charley’s face brightened.) “Go,” he continued, addressing Harry Somerville—“go, tell Tom Whyte I wish to speak to him.”
Harry sprang from his stool with a suddenness and vigour that might have justified the belief that he had been fixed to it by means of a powerful spring, which had been set free with a sharp recoil, and shot him out at the door, for he disappeared in a trice. In a few minutes he returned, followed by the groom Tom Whyte.
“Tom,” said the senior clerk, “do you think we could manage to mount Charley to-morrow?”
“Why, sir, I don’t think as how we could. There ain’t an ’oss in the stable except them wot’s required and them wot’s badly.”
“Couldn’t he have the brown pony?” suggested the senior clerk.
Tom Whyte was a cockney and an old soldier, and stood so bolt upright that it seemed quite a marvel how the words ever managed to climb up the steep ascent of his throat, and turn the corner so as to get out at his mouth. Perhaps this was the cause of his speaking on all occasions with great deliberation and slowness.
“Why, you see, sir,” he replied, “the brown pony’s got cut under the fetlock of the right hind leg; and I ’ad ’im down to L’Esperance the smith’s, sir, to look at ’im, sir; and he says to me, says he ‘That don’t look well, that ’oss don’t,’—and he’s a knowing feller, sir, is L’Esperance though he _is_ an ’alf-breed—”