The Spoilers of the Valley Part 20

The Mayor frowned, but he held rein on his temper.

"That's for a little piece of paper in cipher. It is more than you'll save all your life."

Phil put the three cheques neatly together, folded them up and went over to the furnace. He placed them between some glowing coals and pushed them home with a bar of iron.

He swung round just in time, for Brenchfield was almost on him.

The latter grinned viciously for a moment, then let his clenched hands drop to his sides.

"I can make or break you; and, by heavens! you've made your own choice. I'll break you till you squeal,--then there will be no ten thousand dollars. It will be get out and be-d.a.m.ned to you."

"Go to it," replied Phil easily, "it's your move."

Brenchfield walked to the door.

"Come out and have a look at my horse!" he shouted over his shoulder.

"She wants shoeing all round."

Phil followed to where the sleek, black animal was securely tied to a hitching post. Phil had heard of this particular horse of Brenchfield's. She was the fastest piece of horseflesh in the Valley. She was a beauty, but as vicious with her teeth as she was treacherous with her feet. She had the eye of a devil. No one had been found who could ride her save Brenchfield and no one could groom her but her owner. Several had tried; one had been killed outright, one lamed permanently and others gave up before they were compelled to.

"So this is Beelzebub?" asked Phil.

"Yes!"

"Guess you had better bring her back to-morrow when Hanson is here."

"Can't you shoe a horse?"

"Some horses!"

Brenchfield laughed sarcastically.

"Tie her up in the frame then," said Phil, "and I'll do it. Hanson told me she always has to be shod in that way."

Brenchfield laughed again.

"A bright blacksmith you are!" he grunted.

The young smith's face flushed angrily.

"All right!" he retorted, "leave her where she is. There isn't any horse or anything else belonging to you or connected with you,--and including you--that I can't put shoes on."

Phil went over to look more closely at the animal, as the Mayor went to her head and stroked her nose.

"Sure you're not scared? She's a h.e.l.ler!"

Phil walked round her without answering. He was at her rear, closer than he should have been, when Brenchfield suddenly reached and whispered a peculiar, grating, German-like, guttural sound in the mare's ear.

Like lightning her ears went back, her eyes spurted fire, a thrill ran through her body and her two hind feet shot into the air. Brenchfield shouted warningly.

Phil, only half alert, sprang aside. The iron-ringed hoofs flashed past him, one biting along his cheek and ripping it an eighth of an inch deep. Phil staggered to the wall, as the horse continued to plunge and rear in a paroxysm of madness. Her owner tried to pacify her, but he made little headway with the job.

"Good Lord, man! as a man working among horses don't you know better than to hang around the flanks of one of her kind like that? If she had hit you, it would have been all day with you."

Phil pulled himself together.

"Do you think so?" he remarked in a much more casual tone than he felt.

"It looked for a minute like a bad accident."

"It looked to me like attempted murder," retorted Phil.

Brenchfield frowned, but ignored the opening.

"She's a vicious devil. She takes turns like that occasionally when a stranger is near her."

"You mean _you_ give her turns like that occasionally?" put in Phil suggestively.

At that moment, Jim Langford sauntered round the smithy building into the yard.

"Hullo! A love-feast going on! What's the argument, fellows? What have you been doing to your cheek, Phil?"

The Mayor growled.

"This blacksmith pal of yours thought he could shoe Beelzebub. She's got a mad streak on and pretty nearly laid him out. Now he blames me for rousing her, as if she needs any rousing."

"And so you did! I'm not blind or deaf. I saw you and heard you as well."

Brenchfield laughed and tapped his forehead significantly to Langford.

But Langford did not respond.

"You mean, Phil, that the Mayor knows what they call 'the horse word'?"

"He seems to possess _one_ of them, at any rate," replied Phil.

"So there are two of them?" laughed Jim.

"There ought to be, if there are any at all;--just as there is hot and cold, day and night, right and wrong, good and bad, positive and negative."

"That sounds reasonable enough, too," answered Jim, who turned suddenly to Brenchfield as the latter was frantically endeavouring to quiet the plunging Beelzebub.

"Now then, for the land's sake, Graham Brenchfield _Lavengro_, why don't you use that other word? What's the good of creating a devil if you can't keep the curb on him?"

Brenchfield commenced to belabour the horse in his irritation, but the more he struck the more nervous and vicious she seemed to grow.

The sight set Phil's thoughts awandering. A little door in his brain opened and he remembered the queer little wizened-faced horse rustler in for life at Ukalla Jail, whom he had befriended and who in return had given him a word which he said might be useful some day, as it was guaranteed to quiet the wildest horses. At the time, he had grinned at it in his incredulity, but now the thought came, "What if there might be something in it?"

He had not noted that little word, and now he had a difficulty in recalling it. But, as he reviewed the scene at Ukalla Jail in his mind once more, it came to him. He was not quite certain, but he fancied he had it. What if its strange power were true? It was a queer, soft, foreign-sounding word.