Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/98

86 over and over in many different ways. The result in the future would probably be admirable; but in the childish years it resulted in a rather terrible frankness.

At first he and the Colonel did not get on at all. This was not the Colonel's fault; and indeed the latter was blissfuly unaware of the fact they were not getting on. Merely he found Brainerd a trifle difficult and reserved. In his rides about the country he often swung down by the new farm; and, from the vantage of his saddle, looked about on how things were going. He saw a good many lacks, both in materials and in labour: and at first he sometimes attempted to supply them. Brainerd resented fiercely these kindly meant incursions into his affairs. To his mind they both showed humiliating knowledge of his deficiencies and scented of the big proprietor. All he wanted was to be let alone. His ill health drained down his vitality, so that after his necessary work, he had little energy to contemplate the discouraging total of things necessarily left undone, and none at all with which to be good humoured. The Colonel's geniune [sic] neighbourliness had this effect, however, that Brainerd never quite reached the point of open rebuff, as he certainly would have done to one less sincerely desirous of being friendly. But the Colonel never succeeded in giving him an hour or a cent's worth of help.

It was Mrs. Peyton who in the end brought that about. Allie drove about the ranch and into town behind a pair of diminutive but wicked black ponies. They were not much bigger than good-sized St. Bernard dogs, and they wore long furry coats and copious manes and tails. Polished russet harness attached them to a varnished buckboard that looked several sizes too large for them. When Mrs. Peyton mounted to the seat, she looked as though she had for the fun of the thing taken over a child's equipage. Nevertheless the black ponies would go just as fast as full sized horses. Their legs fairly twinkled as they whirled the varnished buckboard down the road or across country on the rancho; and they could keep it up for hours, ending with the same ludicrous appearance of earnest energy with which they started out. Mrs. Peyton had to have loops in the reins by which to hold them when they felt too fresh. With