Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/144

 from. Poldik’s whip seemed to them a necessary concomitant to their own deliberate pace; if they had missed it in certain conjunctures, and in the same conjunctures had not. heard the well-known oaths, they would certainly have cried out—had they been gifted with human speech—“Why don’t you crack your whip again now? why don’t you swear at us again?”

An anatomist, gazing at their even, and ever sluggish pace, might have verified what muscles it was by which they extended their feet; he would have had plenty of time for this.

For their regularity of movement they were not themselves wholly to blame. They got just enough fodder to keep them in leather, and this leather held them together just enough for Poldik still at times to boast to his companions that they pulled “like clockwork.” Perhaps if they had got more fodder they would have pulled like greased clockwork, but no opportunity was given to them of converting more victuals into blood and muscle; therefore we can believe that if more fodder had been placed before them, they would not have cared about it.

Poldik’s own gait much resembled the pace of these dilapidated horses. By long tramping beside his vehicle, his pace had been drilled into one just as sluggish, slow, and vacillating, even on Sunday, when he no longer walked behind his vehicle, his step was no fresher nor brisker. The ‘tempo’ of