Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [32]
During the afternoon he walked lengthily round his land, half looking for the tramp, to quieten his own conscience; but it was almost with surprise that he finally saw him walking towards him along one of his boundary roads.
The tramp shambled slowly, and he was not alone. At his shoulder, as slowly following, came a horse.
The tramp stopped, and the horse also. The tramp held out a horse cube on a grimy palm, and the horse ate it.
The landowner looked in puzzlement at the two of them, the filthy man and the well-groomed horse in its tidy rug.
‘Where did you get that?’ said the landowner, pointing.
‘Found it. In the road.’ The tramp’s voice was hoarse from disuse, but the words were clear. They were also not true.
‘Look,’ said the landowner awkwardly, ‘you can build that house of yours again, if you like. Stay for a few days. How’s that?’
The tramp considered it but shook his head, knowing that he couldn’t stay, because of the horse. He had freed the horse from its stable and taken it with him. They would call him a thief and arrest him. In his past he had compulsively absconded from institutions, from children’s homes and then the army, and if he couldn’t face the walls of a doss house, still less could he face a cell in the nick. Cold and hunger and freedom, yes. Warmth and food and a locked door, no.
He turned away, gesturing unmistakably to the landowner to take the horse, to put his hand on its head-collar and do what was right. Automatically, almost, the landowner did so.
‘Wait,’ he said, as the tramp retreated. ‘Look… take these.’ He pulled from his pocket a packet of cigarettes and held them out. ‘Take them… please.’
Hesitating, the tramp went back and accepted the gift, nodding his acknowledgement of something given, something received. Then again he turned away and set off down the road, and the long-threatened snow began to fall in big single floating flakes, obliterating his shaggy outline in the dying afternoon.
Where will he go? the landowner wondered uncomfortably: and the tramp thought without anxiety that he would walk all night through the snow to keep warm, and in the morning he would find shelter, and eat, as usual, what others of their plenty had thrown away. The tramp’s earlier festering anger, which had flared up and focused on Jim Turner, had by now burnt away, and all he felt, as he put distance safely behind him, was his normal overwhelming desire to be alone.
The landowner looked at the horse and the white star on its forehead, and shook his head sardonically at the thought which came to him. All the same, when he’d shut the horse into a stable behind his house, he fished out the day before yesterday’s newspapers, and looked at the tabloid’s headline ‘Find the Bright Star’ and at the foal certificate facsimile in the ‘serious’ daily. And then he tentatively telephoned the police.
‘Found a horse, have you, sir?’ said a cheerful sergeant’s voice robustly. ‘And you’re not the only one, I’ll tell you that. There’s horses all over the village, here. Some fool opened all the boxes at Jim Turner’s place and let them all out. It might be a tramp. Turner says he chased one out of his yard earlier. We’re looking for that one as lived on your land. But it’s dark and it’s snowing and I’m short of men, of course, as today’s Christmas Eve.’
Christmas Eve.
The landowner felt first a burst of irritation with the tramp, and then, like a stab, understood that he wouldn’t have set loose the horses if he hadn’t been turned out of his own home at Christmas. He decided not to tell the sergeant that he’d seen the tramp with the horse now in his own stable, nor which way the tramp had gone.
‘I’ll tell Jim Turner to come and fetch that horse, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘He’ll be glad to have it back. In a proper tizzy, he is.’
‘Er…’ said the landowner,