Editors Note:For the sake of continuity, and to avoid confusion, I have changed "Paul" to "Steve", and "Captain" to "Colonel", in this transcript of the book. Some editions still use the original character names, most reprints after the early '70's use the tv series names.

On these early spring Sundays, there were usually a few visitors who came to the farm at the top of the hill.

Some of them were regulars, horse-lovers and children with carrots and apples and sugar for all the horses, and special snacks for their favourites. Peppermints for Cobbler's Dream. Soft stale biscuits for Lancelot, who was too old to have much use of his teeth.

Some of the people who came into the yard under the stone archway were strangers who had been driving by, saw the sign, 'Home of Rest for Horses', and stopped to see what it was all about.

'What's it all about then?' The two boys who had roared up on a motorbike were not the sort of people who usually came to the farm. Nothing much doing here. Daft really. the whole outfit. 'What's it all about?' The taller boy swaggered across the yard as if he had come to buy the place: cracked leather jacket with half the studs fallen out, cheap shiny boots, long seaweed hair, a scrubby fringe of beard that wouldn't grow.

'Saving lives,' Steve muttered, not loud enough for them to understand. They wouldn't understand anyway, that kind. Steve went on sweeping the cobbles, his head down, dark curly hair falling into his eyes.

'Huh?' The shorter, thicker boy looked as if his mother should have had his adenoids out long ago.

'Horses that are too old for work, or too badly treated - we give them a good life.'

'Daft, innit?' The boys went jeering towards the loose boxes that lined three sides of the yard.

'Willy. Spot Ranger. Wonderboy.' The younger boy, about sixteen, with a stupid hanging lip, spelled out the names above the stable doors, to show he could read. 'Cobles Dram. Who-ever heard of a name like that?'

'Cobbler's Dream.' Callie came out of the stable, where she had been brushing the mud off the chestnut pony, whose favourite rolling places would delight a hippopotamus. 'And everybody's heard of him. He was on television. He was in all the newspapers for catching a horse thief.'

'Thrills.' When the boy hung his big cropped head and looked at her with his slow eyes, she thought for a moment she knew him. Where had she seen that broad earthy face with the thick lips hanging open, because he could not breathe through his pudgy nose?

One of the boys threw up a hand and the pony flicked back his ears and jerked his head away.

'That's not the way to go up to a horse,' Callie said. 'Especially Cobby. He's half blind.'

'Don't tell me about horses.' the boy grunted. 'We've got dozens of 'em at home.'

'Bad luck on /them/. Usually Callie was polite to the visitors. Her mother was married to the Colonel, who ran this farm, and Callie loved to take people round the stables or down the muddy track to the fields, and tell them the history of each of the twenty horses, or as much as they would listen to.

But these boys would not listen to any of it. When she started to tell them about Wonderboy, who had been her father's famous steeplechaser before he died, and Ranger with the ruined mouth, and Spot, the circus rosinback with the rump as broad as a table, the taller boy said, 'Oh shut up, you silly kid,' and the younger one stuck out a boot and tripped Callie up as she turned to go to the mule's box.

'What the hell are you playing at?' Steve was there in seconds, holding the broom like a weapon, his clear blue eyes hard with anger.

'Don't touch me,' the boy whined, 'or I'll call the coppers.'

'I'll call them myself if you don't get out of here.'

'Can't wait,' the older boy said. '"Visitors Welcome", it says on the sign. Some welcome. Come on, Lewis.'

Willy the mule stared sadly over his door, a pocket of air in his lower lip, lop ears sagging. Callie, inspecting her grazed hands for blood and disappointed to find none, yelled after them as they ran under the arch, 'Don't bother to come back!'

'Don't worry!' Lewis yelled back over his shoulder. Yes....there was something familiar about him. Where on earth - ?

'Lewis.' She wiped off her hands on the seat of her patched jeans, as if she were wiping off the disgustingness of Lewis.

'Louse,' Steve said.

The motorbike snarled, spat foul smoke and roared away.

->*<-

Dora, the girl who worked with Steve in the stables, had been home for the weekend, but she came back on an early bus, to help with the feeds. She would rather be here than at home anyway. The Colonel had to force her to take an occasional weekend at her parents' flat in the industrial town which sprawled along the valley, to keep her mother from storming up the hill to complain.

Steve's mother did not come, and he had no father. This was his home, and his family. Cobbler's Dream, the pony he had rescued from a spoiled and vicious child, was the horse he loved best.

It was going to be a wet night, so Dora brought the rest of the old horses in from the fields. She was coming round the corner of the barn with the two Shetlands, a handful of shaggy mane in each hand, when a car stopped in the road and a man walked into the yard. A worn-looking horsey type of man, with bow legs and a lean brown face.

'I'm sorry, we're closed to visitors.' Dora shoved one Shetland into it's stable with a slap on its bustling bottom, and made a grab for the long tangled tail of the other, as it ducked under her arm and headed for the feed shed. 'Shut that door!'

The man moved quickly and shut the door in Jock's square face. Dora got her arms round his neck and practically carried him back to the loose box he shared with Jamie and the tiny donkey. They had tubs on the floor because the manger was too high, and they nipped each other round and round the box, going from tub to tub like a buffet lunch.

'I've come to see the manager,' the bow-legged man said.

'The Colonel?' You were supposed to say he was not at home on Sunday afternoons, but Dora always stated facts, even when they were ruder. 'He's in the house, but he can't see you.'

'Why not?'

'He's probably asleep.'

The man bit his lip, which was cracked and dry, like badly kept leather. 'Could you possibly.......It's an emergency. About a horse.'

'Another customer?' Callie came up. The stables at the farm were full, but she always wanted more.

'It's a hard case.' The man looked sad. He looked defeated, as if he had known a lot of disappointments and could not stand anymore. 'The mare is in bad trouble.'

'I'll get the Colonel,' Dora said, but Callie said, 'Let me. He hates being woken up, but at least I do it gently.'

The last time a horse was down at night and thrashing in its box, and Dora had shouted in the Colonel's ear, he had sat up and yelled, 'Messerschmitts - take cover!'

The Colonel came out of the back door with his yellow mongrel dog, pulling his worn tweed cap over sleepy eyes. He was a tall thin man with a slight limp from the war, and a scar by his eye where a kick from one of his horses had left him able to move the right side of his face more than the left, so that you could not always tell if he were serious or joking. He limped down the cinder path in his socks because he couldn't find a pair of shoes, walking on his heels with his toes turned up, because the ground was damp.

He and the bow-legged man leaned against posts with their hands in their pockets and talked quietly. Callie put a wheelbarrow in a doorway and pretended to be cleaning out Lancelot's clean stable, so that she could hear.

'........but I can't do any more,' the man was saying, 'because I lost my job.'

'I'm sorry.' The Colonel waited. He was a good listener.

'Down at the Pinecrest.'

The Pinecrest was an unattractive shabby hotel outside the town, with no pine trees in sight and not on the crest of a hill, but in a swampy valley where a polluted stream ran sluggishly through, gathering more pollution from the garbage that the Pinecrest cook threw out of the back door.

'I was in the stables there. They hire out riding hacks, you know.'

'Yes I know.' The Colonel made a face as if he would rather not know.

'It's been on my mind,' the groom said. 'I done my best for my horses, but they want to get the last scrap of work out of them, and they're not fit for it.' The Colonel waited. 'Well, you can't feed more than the owner will buy, can you? The pasture is all grazed out and the hay he bought - you wouldn't use it for bedding.'

'They got a license to run a riding stable?'

'Must do, or they couldn't be in business. I don't know how they got it though, unless they bribed the authorities, which I wouldn't put it past them, the kind of people they are.'

'Why did you stay with them?'

'Work's not easy to find.' The groom shrugged. 'I kept my mouth shut, because I needed the job, and my horses needed me. But then I couldn't hold myself in any longer. When I hit that boy of theirs - he was lucky I didn't kill him - they said, "Pack your bags and keep walking." '

'What happened?'

'They've got this old mare, see? A good one once. They got her off the track because she wouldn't race, and they've always kept her down and very poor, so she'd be quiet enough to ride. Quiet! The poor thing can hardly raise a canter. She gets a saddle sore, of course, with that thin thoroughbred skin and no flesh on her. Well, then it's my day off, and this fat lady comes to the hotel. "I want to ride Beauty Queen," she says. Beauty Queen, that's what they call her, though she'd win no prizes anywhere. I come back early with a bag of cracked corn I'd managed to scrounge from a friend of mine who has some poultry, and someone yells, "Hey you! Saddle up Beauty Queen for this lady." "Her back's not healed," I says, shutting the door of my car quick, so they wouldn't see the bag of corn and grab it to make porridge for the guests. "Saddle her up, I told you!"

That was their eldest son, name of Todd, very ugly customer. When I refused, he gets the saddle himself and thumps it on to the old mare's back' - the groom winced, as if he could feel the pain of it himself - 'and leads her out. I grab the rein and start to lead her back inside, and when the boy gets in the doorway to stop me, I knock him sideways.'

'Into the manure heap, I do hope.' Callie was frankly listening now, standing in Lancelot's doorway with a foot on the barrow handle and her chin on the fork.

'Right.' The groom smiled for the first time, then turned back to the Colonel with a long face. 'So I lost my job, and the horses lost me, and Beauty - well, God knows what will happen to her.'

'What about the RSPCA?'

'The Inspector is away. I can't wait, because I'm leaving for Scotland first thing tomorrow. I've a pal up there might have a job for me. So I came to you, because I heard what you do here for horses. Will you help?'

'Oh Lord,' the Colonel said. 'I'll try.' He hated trouble and this looked like trouble, but for a horse, he would get into trouble with both feet. Last year, he had got himself knocked out at Westerham Fair, taking on a giant of a man who was dragging off a mare in foal tied to the tail gate of a lorry.

->*<-

'Remember when you pulled that chap out of the driver's cab and found out how big he was?' Steve laughed, remembering, as they drove next day down the long winding hill and headed towards the Pinecrest Hotel.

The Colonel grinned with the agile side of his face. 'I wouldn't have tackled him if I'd known.'

'You would.' Steve drove fast and cheerfully. He liked to drive the little sports car, which the Colonel wasted by driving too cautiously, and he loved to go on rescue missions like this. It made his nerves hum and his body feel light and strong at the same time. If he had lived in olden days, he would have gone off hacking at dragons with a two-bladed sword.

'Don't drive so fast,' the Colonel said. 'I've got to think out how I'm going to handle this.'

'Why can't we just march in, demand to see the horses, and if the mare's condition is as bad as the groom said, take her away? I could start leading her home while you go back for the horse box.'

'And get charged with - let's see: forcing an entry,' the Colonel ticked it off on his fingers, 'breach of the peace - that's if you get into a fight - trespassing, horse stealing. No, Steve, we've got to be very careful to stay on the right side of the law.'

'Oh that.' Steve shifted impatiently. When he was younger, he had got into a lot of trouble for not caring which side was which. 'The mare is in a bad way. That's what counts.'

'We've got to do it right.' The Colonel bit at the skin round his nails, a habit that Callie's mother had been trying to get rid of since she married him. He remembered, and put the hand down into his jacket pocket. 'I've got twenty other horses and ponies to think of. No help to them if I get my stable closed down.'

'No one would do that. Everyone's proud of the farm.'

'You'd be surprised, Steve. There are people round here who'd be glad to see us go out of business. They think the farm is a waste of money and a waste of land. Unproductive. Plough it under and raise wheat for the starving millions.'

'Couldn't grow much wheat on our chalky soil.'

'Face it, Steve,' the Colonel said gloomily, biting his nails again. 'There are people who don't like horses. Incredible, but true. Horses smell. They bring flies. They give you asthma. One end kicks and the other end bites. They get through gaps in hedges and go across people's land.'

'Old Beckett.'

'If a brewery Clydesdale with feet the size of Stroller's went over your lettuce seedlings, you wouldn't be so keen on horses either. These people at the Pinecrest sound very tricky. I can't risk any trouble. So back me up, Steve. Try and look like the assistant to the Agricultural and Domestic Animals County Surveyor.'

'Who's he?'

'I've just invented him.'

'Good morning to you!' The Colonel was always at his most polite when he was nervous. 'Am I speaking to the lady of the house?'

The elderly woman who was crouched over a weedy flower-bed outside the hotel looked up, brushing back wild grey hair.

'If you mean Mrs H.,' she said, 'I think she's in the kitchen discussing menus with the cook. Listen - you'll hear plates and saucepan lids flying. I merely live here. But there's nothing to do and the garden is so run down, I thought I'd give myself some bending exercise, at least.'

She began to get up, clutching her back and groaning, and the Colonel gallantly helped her to her feet.

'If you've come about taking rooms - ' she looked suspiciously at the Colonel and Steve.

'No, we - er, we've come to see - '

' - my advice to you is forget it.'

She paddled off in grey gym shoes with her toes turned out. The hotel door had opened, and an anxious little woman with nervous hands and a twitching mouth had come out.

'Dear Mrs Ogilvie.' She tried a laugh. 'Quite a joker. No need to take any notice of what she says. She's a bit - you know.' She tapped her head, which was done up in pink rollers.

'Too true.' Mrs Ogilvie spun round in the gym shoes. 'Anyone must be to stay in this dump.'

->*<-

'She's been here for five years,' Mrs Hammond whispered. 'We can't get her out of the bridal suite. But come in, do. Mustn't keep you standing. It looks like rain.' She put out a hand and squinted suspiciously up at an innocently blue sky. 'Come into the office and let's see what we can do for you.'

She was all smiles and pleasantries, and so was her husband when he came into the office, summoned by a maid who opened a door and yelled down an echoing stone passage, 'Mr H! You're wanted up front!'

After what the groom had told them, Steve and the Colonel were surprised to find him quite an agreeable man, a bit soapy and smiling too much, with an oiled wave in his hair and small pointed teeth like a saw, but not the mean and brutish tyrant they had expected.

The Colonel was thrown out of gear. They chatted politely about nothing much, and although he kept trying to start his piece about the Agricultural and Domestic Animal County Surveyor, he could never quite get it out. Instead of being put at his ease by the smiling Hammond's, he was even more nervous. He Shifted his feet. He blew his nose. He bit round his nails - what a giveaway. Steve wanted to slap at his hand as Anna would have done.

When Mr Hammond finally stopped vapourising about the weather and taxes and asked him, 'And what can I do for you, sir?' the Colonel lost his nerve completely and blurted out, 'Well, it's like this. I'm from the Home of Rest for Horses, up at Follyfoot Farm.'

That did it. Steve had told him at least twice, 'Keep quiet about the farm, till we see the mare.' But Mr Hammond said without relaxing his smile, 'I know that, of course.'

'You know the Colonel?' Steve asked, surprised.

'Oh yes, I've heard a lot about the Major, Mr Hammond deliberately upgraded him. 'It's wonderful work you're doing up there.'

'Yes indeed, very wonderful. The poor dumb beasts.' Mrs Hammond's anxious eyes misted over slightly under the rollers.

'Of course,' said the Colonel, trying to get the talk round his way, 'most of my horses are past working, but in a stable like yours, they have to earn their keep.'

'You've hit it on the nail, Major,' Mr Hammond complimented him as if he had said something clever. 'I'm not a rich man, but I feed the best. Hard food, hard grooming, hard work, and what do you get?'

The Colonels eyes were glazing over. They were all sitting down, too comfortable, and Mrs Hammond had sent the noisy maid for coffee. Would they ever get out to the stables?

'What do you get? I'll tell you what you get.' Mr Hammond, with his long glossy sideburns and his smiling sharp teeth, was an unstoppable tap of horse hokum. 'You get a fit horse, as you and I, sir, very well know, eh? Eh, lad?' He winked at Steve, as if this was a chummy secret.

The Colonel cleared his throat desperately. 'How about stable help? Hard to get these days.'

'You've hit the nail again, Major. I'm not a rich man, but I pay the best. But they don't want to work, that's where it is. Had to get rid of a chap just the other day. Lazy! You've no idea. And when my son went to speak to him about neglecting the horses, he went for the boy. Like a madman, Major. He had to go. I'm running the stable now with my boys, though one's still at school. Too much for me, with the hotel as well, but the horses come first.'

'I'd love to see them.' The Colonel stood up quickly and moved towards the passage door, but Mr Hammond was quicker.

'Flattered, Major. flattered.' He moved casually but swiftly in front of the door. 'A man of your experience, interested in our modest - '

'I am,' said the Colonel firmly. 'Let's have a look at 'em.'

Still smiling, still soapy, Mr Hammond managed to say No without saying it. 'Feeding time....highly sensitive animals.....nervous when they're disturbed...' The coffee arrived right on cue, and the Colonel and Steve had to sit down again and drink it. It was as soapy as its owner, with scummy milk and bitter grounds. Steve's cup had lipstick on it.

They left in a flurry of smiles and compliments. 'So kind of you to drop in....always nice to swap horse yarns...' and a shout from the grey-haired lady who was back at the flower-bed, cutting everything down with a pair of rusty sheep shears, 'I didn't think you'd stay!'

Steve drove out of the back gate, past the stables, a patched together, rickety line of uneven sheds with a couple of thin horses in the yard outside, nosing sadly about in the trodden mud. Bales of mouldy hay were piled in an open shed. A boy was leaning against them, a cigarette smoking on his hanging lip.

It was the boy Lewis, who had tripped Callie up in the yard at the farm.

->*<-

'He bluffed me out,' the Colonel said.

'That wasn't difficult,' Steve said glumly.

'Don't talk to the Colonel like that,' Anna said, and the Colonel said, 'He's right. I was a flop.'

They were all sitting round the kitchen table at the farmhouse, trying to work out the next move. Anna, the Colonel's wife and Callie's mother, with her long pale hair pinned on top of her head. Callie in her school uniform, trying to do homework and be part of the talk at the same time. Steve disgusted, but eating slice after slice of homemade bread as Anna cut it. Dora with her untidy hair and brown blunt face, two puppies snoring in her lap. Little Slugger Jones, ex-jockey, ex-boxer, who worked with Steve and Dora in the stables.

'He wants to keep his nose out of trouble,' Slugger said. 'That's what he wants to do.' He had been punched about so much in his boxing days that he could no longer talk directly to anybody, only to himself.

'That's no help to that poor mare,' Dora said.

'There she goes again.' Slugger munched cake with his gums. He was losing his teeth and hair at an equal rate. 'All excited over hearsay talk.'

'Slugger might be right, you know,' the Colonel said. Sometimes he is. How do we know that groom was telling the truth?'

'Of course he was. You heard him.' Callie drew beautiful lines under her Earth Science heading, but could write nothing more.

'Suppose he was trying to get back at them for sacking him?'

'But suppose - ' Callie was having an idea - 'suppose those boys came up on the bike yesterday because they thought the groom was here?'

'Good grief, she's brilliant,' Dora said.

Steve said, 'She's almost human.'

'That boy Steve saw at the Pinecrest. Lewis. Louse. I've seen him too, but I can't think where. He's no good. Oh, Colonel.' She still called him that, although he was her stepfather. 'Please - you must go back!'

'When the Cruelty to Animals man gets home - '

'It can't wait!'

'That wretched mare - '

'An infected sore on a thoroughbred - '

They rounded on him, Dora, Steve, Callie, even Anna, who was quickly moved to pity.

'I can't get in. He'll bar the way with those teeth.'

'Pretend you want to hire a horse.'

'I can't. They know me.'

'But they don't know me.' Dora stood up, spilling sleepy puppies. 'I wasn't here when the boys came. "Good morning, Mr Hammond, I want to hire a hack" (anyone got any money?) "Certainly, madam." "Let me see all your horses and I'll choose" '

'They'll rumble you, Steve said. 'One look at your hands, and they'll know you work in a stable.'

'No they won't. I'll go disguised as one of those silly women who say they can ride and then don't even know how to hold the reins. Anna - lend me those pink flowered pants.'

'Yes, and that nylon top with the frills.'

'What on my feet?'

'Those plastic sandals Corinne left.'

'Long dangly earrings.'

'Lots of makeup.'

'Nail varnish.'

'Scent. My "Passion Flowers".'

'Love beads.'

'A hair ribbon.'

'You're putting me off my tea.' Dora pushed away her plate.'But I'll do it. For poor old Beauty Queen, I'll do it.'

Steve drove her in the farm truck to a crossroads half a mile from the Pinecrest Hotel, and got her bicycle out of the back.

'Be sure and wait for me,' she told him. 'I'm not going to ride this thing ten miles home and up that hill. Especially in this outfit.'

Dora never wore anything but jeans and sweaters and old shirts of Steve's that had shrunk in the wash. She had one skirt for going home to her mother. She felt ridiculous in the flowered pants and the earrings, with the garish eye makeup and the pale shiny lipstick and silver nail varnish with which Anna and Callie had prepared her as carefully as if she were a film star going on to the set. The "Passion Flowers" scent made her slightly sick. Horses were her natural perfume.

She approached the Pinecrest stables doubtfully, but the man who came out greeted her without surprise.

'Looking for someone dear?

'I want to hire a horse to go for a horseback ride,' said Dora in the kind of voice someone would have who would go riding dressed like this.

'All right, dear,' said the man, still unsurprised. First bad mark to him. If he ran a decent riding stable, he would have said, Go home and get a proper outfit.

'My friend told me you had beautiful animals here.' Girls who looked like this always had 'my friend' who told them this or that fantasy. The man was grinning as if he liked girls who looked like this, so Dora risked a seductive smile and a bit of a hip swing through the muddy yard. 'Might I see them all?'

'Come along in, my dear.'

Steve had said, 'Yuck!' when Dora got into the truck with him, but Mr Hammond('Call me Sidney') seemed to find her divine.

The Stables were what you would expect of a second rate riding school just managing to sneak in under the law. Outside, a scrubby paddock with a trodden ring and a few flimsy jumps made of oil drums and old doors. Inside, jerry built loose boxes with no windows, and narrow standing stalls, with a clay floor stamped into holes and hillocks. Woodwork chewed from boredom - or hunger. Scanty , dirty bedding. Flies. Thin horses with dusty coats, many of them with telltale patches of white where the hair had grown in over an old sore. As far as Dora could see, most of them needed shoeing.

'What a pretty horse. Oh, I like that spotted one. Why is he waving his head like that? What's he trying to say? Ah, the wee pony. Got the moth a bit, hasn't he?'

As Sidney Hammond showed her round the stable, she made stupid remarks to disguise what she thought. Some of the horses were fat enough, the chunky, cobby kind who wouldn't lose weight if you fed them diet pills; but many of them were ribby and hippy, gone over at the knee, and you could tell by their eyes that they had lost hope. Dora wanted to untie all their broken and knotted rope halters, let them all out, and herd them slowly back to the farm, wobbling behind them on her bicycle.

But, as the Colonel said, 'Face it, everyone isn't like us. If we took away every horse that wasn't kept by our standards, we'd have half the horses in the country up here.'

And she was here to look at Beauty Queen. That was her job.

->*<-

And Sidney Hammond, although ignorant and probably miserly, was quite nice to his horses. He slapped them on their bony rumps and thin ewe necks, and told tall tales about their breeding and performance.

'This little grey. Irish bred. What a goer across country! Now hears a bay mare. Perfect lady's hack. Suit you all the way, she would. Todd! He shouted towards the tack room, where a transistor radio was blasting.

A tall weedy boy with a feeble growth of beard appeared in the doorway. 'What do you want?' he shouted back. He inspected Dora from head to foot and back up again, and favoured her with a breathy wolf whistle.

'Get the tack for Penny.'

'Oh, just a moment, there's one horse I didn't give a sugar lump to.' In a dark corner box, Dora had spotted an unmistakable thoroughbred head beyond the cobwebby bars. She ran down the littered aisle, stumbling in the loose sandals. Before Sidney could reach her, she slid back the bolt and went into the box, where a thin chestnut mare rested a back leg in the dirty straw, wearing a torn rug.

'Why is she wearing pyjamas?' Dora looked innocently up at Sidney. Anna had put so much black stuff on her lashes that she could hardly see.

'Keep her warm, love.'

'But she's sweating. Let me - '

'Best not touch her,' Sidney said quickly. 'She's nervous.'

'Oh, I'm not afraid of her.' She reached up and quickly but carefully folded the rug back on to the neck of the mare, who jumped away in pain.

No wonder. The saddle sore on her high withers was two or three inches wide, oozing and raw.

'Oh God!' Dora said in her normal voice, but Sidney Hammond was too busy explaining to notice.

'Looks worse than it is. All my groom's fault. I sacked him for letting it get so bad. It's clearing up with this new ointment.'

'Have you had the vet?'

'Of course, love.' When he was telling a full scale lie, his mouth went on smiling, but his eyes did not.

'He can't be much good. I know someone who could help.'

'I'm not a rich man, you know. I can't afford these huge fees.'

'No, I mean at Follyfoot Farm. The place where they have the old horses.'

'But Beauty Queen isn't old.' If Mr Hammond guessed at a connection between Dora and the Colonel, his soft-soaping smile didn't show it.

'They might take her though. I know a boy - ' Dora lowered the heavy lashes coyly - 'a boy who works there. Shall I ask?'

Mr Hammond sighed, and surrendered. 'If it's best for Beauty. I'm up to my neck here, short-handed, all these animals and a hotel full of guests....'

He started to cover the mare's back, but Dora said, 'Let's take off the rug and put ointment on, and a clean rag or something.'

'You're a great girl.' Sidney squeezed her hand. 'A real little Samaritan.'

When they left the box, the bay mare was drooping between pillar reins, with a long cheeked curb bridle and an ugly old saddle that made Beauty's back understandable.

'You pay in advance,' said smiling Sidney.

'How much?'

'Fifteen bob to you, my dear.'

'Oh, I'm afraid that's too much.'

Some other people had come to ride, three women in tight jodhpurs who looked as if they were housewives hoping to lose weight, and other horses were being saddled.

Sidney lowered his voice. 'Ten shillings then, but keep it dark.'

'Oh no said Dora, glad to find a way out of riding poor Penny, although she would only have taken her round the nearest corner and let her graze for an hour. 'That wouldn't be fair on you. I'll come back when I'm not so broke. I'll ring up the farm about Beauty. Don't worry.'

She ducked under Penny's pillar rein and got herself out to the yard, where one of the housewives already had her stout thighs across a hairy cob with its eyes half shut. Dora paused briefly to let out a couple of links in its curb chain, and ran - slop, slop in the plastic sandals - to her bicycle.

'Don't forget to come back, my dear!' Sidney Hammond was in the stable doorway, smiling and waving.

->*<-

'And perhaps I will,' Dora said. 'Don't laugh, but I quite liked him. He was nice to me.'

Beauty Queen had been brought up to the farm, Sidney Hammond profuse with thanks, blessings, promises to pay whatever he could ('though I'm not a rich man'), and make endowments in his will.

'I've got to laugh,' Steve said. 'You had him cornered and he knew it. He had to be nice.'

'He fancied me.'

'Hah!' said Steve. 'Listen to that, Callie. Get her all dressed up, and look what happens.'

'It was the Passion Flowers.' Callie was standing on a box, very tenderly smoothing the ointment the vet had prescibed on to the chestnut mare's back. 'It went to her head.'

Callie had inherited from her mother a natural gift for caring for sick or injured animals. Beauty Queen, rechristened Miss America, was in the foaling stable behind the barn, and since Steve and Dora and Slugger were busy enough, it was Callie's job to clean the wound with warm water and hydrogen peroxide, and put on ointment and antiseptic powder.

She got up earlier to take care of Miss before she went to school, and rushed straight back to the mare as soon as she got home on the bus, so that her uniform was always smeared with ointment and powder and her school shoes full of bedding.

When Anna complained, Callie said, 'Then don't make me go to school.'

She had never liked the big rough school on the outskirts of the manufacturing town which lay further along the valley; but it was the only one, unless she went to boarding school, and Callie would not hear of leaving the farm.

This year, school was worse than ever. There was a rotten gang of older boys who were always in trouble, except with those teachers who were afraid of them, and who got themselves through the boredom of the day by terrorizing some of the younger children. The sneaky kids sneaked, and got beaten up. The fighting kids fought back, and got left alone. The others simply tried to keep clear of the bullies. Callie was one of the others.

But one day when she was sitting on the playground wall reading, because she got all the exercise she needed at the farm, and she hated games with balls because she was shortsighted, a foot suddenly came up underneath the open book and sent it flying.

Three big brutish boys scrummed for it, knocking each other down, and when they got up, howling like inane hyenas, the book and cover were in shreds.

It was a library book and she would have to pay for it, but Callie walked away in silence, stretching her eyes to keep the tears back.

'Hey!' A hand took her arm and spun her round. 'I know you, stupid crybaby!'

'Let me go. I'll scream.'

'Try it.' The boy guffawed. 'We'll give you something to scream about.' He had a broad stupid face, with a pudgy nose and thick hanging lips. It was Lewis the Louse. This was where she had seen him before. Hanging about with the bad crowd. This school was so big that you couldn't know all the names, not even all the faces.

'Yeah.' He dropped her arm, staring. 'I do know you. You live up the hill, don'cha?'

Callie nodded, sick with fear. The three large boys stood round her. With such a shrieking mob in the playground, no one would see or hear whatever they did to her.

'You belong to that chap with the gimpy leg - haw haw, jolly good show and all that sort of rot.' The Louse did a rotten imitation of what he thought would be the voice of someone like the Colonel.

'My mother is married to him.'

'Oh girls! It's too romantic.' Lewis snuffled in his horrible blocked-up nose. Then he leaned forward and put his face so close to Callie's that she could see all the pimples and open pores. 'You know who I am, don'cha?'

She nodded, staring at him like a rabbit.

'Your lot tried to make trouble for us. Remember that, you guys.' He jerked his head at his friends, who were even uglier and stupider (if possible) than him. 'We don't like this person.'

'But I'm taking care of your horse!' Callie was bolder, thinking of poor Miss America, who was her life's purpose at the moment.

'Quite right,' said Lewis, 'quite right. And we'll take care of you. Don't forget it.'

He snapped his thick grubby finger in Callie's face and sauntered off, his friends behind him, singing a crude song, whose key words they changed briefly while they passed a teacher, and then took up again.

When Callie was really upset, she couldn't talk about it. All she could do was to say she had a bad headache the next day, and all this got her was that Anna made her stay in bed and would not let her go to the stable to take care of Miss America.

She knew that Callie had not got a headache. That was why she did that. And because she knew she hadn't got a headache, she sat on Callie's bed in the dark that night and asked her what was wrong.

'Oh - nothing. It's just school.' Callie tossed about, and the kitten who was on the bottom of the bed made a pounce at her toes.

'Was there trouble? Work, or what?'

Usually Callie did not like to have her hair touched, but when her mother stroked it at night, it was all right.

She shook her head under the stroking hand. How was it you could manage not to cry until someone gave you sympathy? It ought to be lack of sympathy that made you cry.

'What then?'

Callie sniffed. 'It's just - oh, I hate the kids.'

'Aren't there any friends?'

'I'm not the type that makes friends, you know that. All my friends are here. Most of them have got four legs.'

'You ought to have friends your own age.' All mothers worry once in a while that their child is 'different', though they wouldn't really like it if they weren't. 'Perhaps we should think about boarding school.'

'Mother, you promised.'

'Let's see how things go then.'

->*<-

But things did not go any better. They went worse. Wherever Callie went, Lewis and his gang seemed to be there, jeering at her, tripping her up, jumping out from behind lockers, tweaking a pigtail as they ran by.

One day she was changing classrooms, going upstairs as Lewis was coming down, and he bumped into her so hard that he knocked her back down the stairs. She caught the rail and steadied herself against the wall. The rest of her class went on up the stairs. In this school, if you saw trouble brewing, you got out of the way.

'What do you want?' Callie stood against the wall with her hands spread out as if she was going to be shot. When she was afraid, it went to her stomach. She thought she was going to bring up her lunch all over the Louse's elastic-sided boots.

'Don't be afraid, little girl.' He put on a kind of leer which he thought was a smile. 'I got a present for you.'

Callie managed to say, 'Oh?' and swallowed her lunch back down.

'Knowing how much you love our four-footed friends - ' from behind his back he handed out a parcel wrapped in newspaper - 'I brought this for you.'

Callie took it, watching him.

'Go on. Open it. You'll like it really.'

It smelled peculiar, but Callie gingerly unwrapped the newspaper and saw that she was holding the hoof of a dead horse. Where it had been cut off, it was congealed with black blood and dirt.

She wrapped it up quickly again and handed it back to Lewis. She could not speak.

'Don't you recognise it?' he jeered. 'You should do. I thought you was so fond of poor old Beauty Queen.'

'You couldn't - ' she whispered.

'It's still our horse, ain't it? Too bad you didn't take better care of her, for we had to have her destroyed this morning. Very 'umane. A merciful release.' He shoved the newspaper bundle back into Callie's hands and ran away.

She could not believe him. Yet she had to believe him. It was a narrow, well-bred hoof, the pale colour that goes with a chestnut's white leg. She must telephone her mother. Yet she could not telephone her mother. As long as she didn't hear the truth, it still could be not true.

After she had been sick in the cloakroom, she went down to the basement furnace and got a shovel, and buried the hoof in the newspaper under the bushes behind the goalposts. She then went back to her classroom.

'Where on earth - ' Miss Golding began, then saw Callie's face.

I was sick.'

Immediately there was a clamour from the class of, 'I knew that sausage was off', 'It was the spuds, they boil 'em in the dishwater', 'You won't catch me eating their treacle roll.'

'Do you want to lie down? Shall I ring up your home?'

'I'm all right.' Callie sat down.

At the end of the day, she went to the bus like a sleepwalker, and sat at the back, staring straight ahead, not looking out of the window all the way to ride a cross-country course alongside the road, as she usually did. The bus climbed the hill and stopped by the gate of the farm.

'Give my love to the old horses,' the driver said, as he always did.

'Thank you,' Callie said, as she always did. She went under the stone arch and walked across the yard going towards the house. Her mother would be starting supper. She would turn from the stove and Callie would know at once from her face whether it was true.

Several horses called to her. Cobbler's Dream in the corner box banged on his door and swung his head with the flashy white blaze up and down to get her attention. She was almost at the corner of the yard where the path came in from the house when Steve backed out of the Weaver's stable, dragging a loaded barrel.

'Hi!' he shouted. 'Aren't you going to see your patient?'

Callie turned slowly round.

'Her back looks much better today. You're doing a good job.'

Callie ran. It was not until she was in the loose box with her head against Miss America's thin thoroughbred neck that she began to cry.

->*<-

After the Easter holidays started, Callie told her mother that she could not stay at that school.

'I'd better start finding out about boarding schools.'

'We can't afford it.'

'No.' Anna laughed. 'But you could try for a scholarship.'

'I'm not clever enough.'

'We'll see.'

They did not discuss it any more. Why spoil the holidays? The days were roofed with blue sky and whipped cream clouds. The old horses luxuriated in the sun on their dozing backs. Callie rode Cobbler's Dream, and the mule, and Hero the circus horse, and anyone else who was ridable, and she and Steve and Dora jogged up to the higher hills where the turf was patched with rings of white and yellow flowers, like fried eggs.

Miss America's back was healed and they could ride her too. Fleshed out and well fed, she was a pleasant ride, although her thoroughbred stride had been stiffened by pounding on roads, and from the way she chucked up her head, you could guess at the kind of hands that had tugged at her reins.

They rode her in a snaffle, bareback to make sure of not hurting her, and the mare flourished in the warm spring.

'But there's always a fly in the ointment,' Dora said.

The fly was Sidney Hammond, arriving with a lopsided trailer with the tailboard tied with rope, to take back his mare.

'Don't let her go.' Steve and Dora cornered the Colonel in the tack room when he went to get a halter.

'It's his horse. We've done what we set out to do. He's very busy, he says. He's getting a lot of people from town, secretaries and things wanting to go pony trekking at weekends. He needs the mare.'

'She isn't a pony.'

'Dora. Don't try to annoy me.' The Colonel did not want Miss America to go either.

Mr Hammond was as smiley and ingratiating as ever, as well he might be, since he hadn't paid a penny for the mare's keep, in spite of all his blessings and promises.

Dora kept out of his sight, in case she might need to put on the pink pants and 'Passion Flowers' disguise again to go and check on Miss America when she was back at the Pinecrest as Beauty Queen. Steve helped Mr Hammond load the mare, making a big fuss about spreading straw on the rotting tailboard in case of splinters.

As the trailer pulled away, he said, 'What a hunk of junk,' loud enough for Mr Hammond to hear, but smiling Sidney merely waved and grinned, and leaned out of the car window to call once again, 'I can never thank you enough, Major!'

'I'll send you a bill! the Colonel called after him, not loud enough to hear.

'You know he won't,' Slugger grumbled, sweeping up the old manure that Steve had kicked out of the van before he would lead Miss America in. 'You know he's too soft with these folk who could well pay to help out them as can't.'

'Shut up, Slugger,' the Colonel said. 'You know we only ask people to pay what they can afford.'

'And that one could well afford.'

'I said I'll send him a bill.'

'Oh yes, just like he sent in a bill to that old clothes and firewood chap as brought the pony in here for two weeks rest and we had the beggar all winter. Have us all in Queer Street, that lot will. Oh yes, he says. Send in a bill, he says.....' Slugger grumbled away, sweeping the gravel before him with short testy jabs.

->*<-

It was Dora's birthday. She had wanted to spend it at the farm, but her mother wanted her at home, so she had to put on her skirt and go down into the town.

Her mother, who was still hoping that she would grow out of horses, although there was no evidence, at seventeen, that she ever would, had assembled a group of 'interesting' people to try to show her the kind of life she was missing.

A girl from an art school, starved and pale, with round glasses like wheel trims and a long dusty dress with a trodden hem. Two serious boys with bushy beards who were teaching problem children to get rid of their problems by screaming and hitting each other. A few grownups whose mouths kept on opening and shutting long after Dora had stopped listening.

She was so bored that she ate too much to pass the time, fell asleep on the bus going home, and was carried past the village where she was supposed to change buses.

'Where are we?' She woke with a start as the driver braked round a sharp corner.

He stopped at the next crossroads and showed her a lane which led to the main road, where she might get another bus back.

It was late afternoon, with the twilight settling on the budding hedges in the valley, and damp beginning to rise from the ground through the new spring grass. Dora walked by the side of the road, getting her feet wet. She was not sure where she was, but when she went over a bridge, she thought she might be crossing the sluggish brown river that ran by the Pinecrest Hotel. If there were no buses on the main road, she would get a lift from the first car that would stop.

'Come back with her throat cut one day, she will,' Slugger Jones always grumbled when Dora turned up from town in a strange car or on the back of a motorbike.

'There are some weird people about these days,' Anna warned, but Dora said, 'No weirder than me,' and went on hitchhiking.

She had promised to be back for supper. After that lunch, she could never eat again. But Anna had made a cake. And there would be no 'interesting' people with 'stimulating' talk. Just people who knew each other well, and were sure of being liked.

Behind her in the lane, she heard the clop-clop of a trotting horse, that always stirring sound that brings people to their windows or out to the gate, even if they have their own horses to clop-clop with.

Dora turned and stood still to watch it come by. As the man and horse came into view out of the dusk, she saw that i was Miss America. Dora stepped out into the road and held up her hand like a school crossing patrolman.

The mare stopped of her own accord. She was not so much being ridden, as carrying an unsteady rider, who nearly pitched over her head when she stopped.

'Whoops.' He clung round Miss America's neck and smiled foolishly at Dora, who saw that he was drunk. She also saw that the saddle with which he had so little contact was a heavy broken thing, well down the mare's bony withers.

Dora saw red. She grabbed the man's arm and pulled him off the horse. He was halfway off anyway.

'Thanks.' He landed on his feet, with the luck of a drunk. 'I was wondering whether to get on the ground or back in the saddle.'

'You shouldn't be in that saddle.' Furiously, Dora unbuckled the girth and lifted off the saddle. The sore back had broken open again, raw and bleeding.

Dora swore. 'Here - just a minute - ' The man lurched at her, but she went to the side of the road and pitched the old saddle over a thick hedge into the bushes.

'Now look what you've done!' The man's red face was woeful. 'How am I going to ride this thing home?'

'You're not,' Dora said.

'Have to walk then.' Strengthening himself with a swig from a flask in his breeches pocket, he looped the reins over his arm and started off down the road. The mare was slightly lame.

Dora followed a short distance behind. The man weaved down the lane in the failing light, staggering now and then and propping himself up with a hand on the mare's neck. When he came to the main road, he stood for a while watching the cars go past, turning his head from side to side as if he were at a tennis match.

Dora watched him. Finally he seemed to make up his mind. He took the reins over Miss America's head and tied them very carefully round a signpost. Then he stepped into the road with his arm raised, outlined unsteadily in the lights of a car. The luck of a drunk still held. The car stopped, and he got in and was driven away.

Dora untied the mare and they walked along the grass at the side of the road until they came to the Dog and Whistle, where Dora could telephone for Steve to bring the horse box.

In the farmhouse, Callie greeted her. 'I got you a present. Want to see?'

'Thanks. I got you one too. Want to see?'

'Where?'

'In the foaling stable.'

'A new customer!' Callie ran out.

Dora asked Anna, 'Is - er, the Colonel in a good mood?'

'He was.' Anna said. 'What have you brought home?'

'Miss America,' Dora said. 'Her back has broken down again.'

->*<-

The Colonel did not say much. He waited to see what would happen. When nothing happened, he telephoned the Pinecrest Hotel.

'Good morning, Major. Nice to hear your voice.'

'I've got your mare.'

'That's good of you.'

'Her back is almost as bad as it was before.'

'That fellow - that stupid drunk - it's all his fault. I tell you, Major, this riding school game is one long headache.'

'What happened?'

'I wish I knew. He came back here with a hangover and a cockeyed story about losing the saddle and tying the horse to a signpost. He'd been back to all the signposts on all the side turnings along the main road, and when the mare wasn't there and wasn't here in the stable, he thought he'd imagined the whole thing, and swore to go on the wagon.'

'Good.' The Colonel waited.

Mr Hammond waited too. Finally he said, 'I thought the mare might have run to you, seeing she was so well kept there before. I'm grateful, Major.'

'You want me to keep her?'

'You know I'm short-handed here.'

'So am I.'

'But your staff are reliable. I work my fingers to the bone, but I have to leave a lot to my boys, and - well, you know what they are these days. You can't trust them with anything. Especially a valuable horse like Beauty.' He would not even stick up for his own family. 'So if you could do me a favour, Major, I'll pay anything you want.'

'You didn't pay the last bill,' the Colonel murmured without moving his lips. He hated talking about money.

'The cheque is in the post.'

Mr Hammond rang off cheerfully, with best wishes to all for the Easter season. The man was incredible. He had no shame at all.

'He's not going to get the mare back though,' the Colonel said. 'But somehow I don't think he'll ask.'

'I worry about his other horses.' Dora frowned. 'I don't see how he ever got a stable license.'

'Perhaps he didn't,' Steve said. 'Why don't you ask the County Council, Colonel?'

'They'll think I'm suspicious.'

'Well, you are.'

At the County Council, they told him that the Pinecrest's application for a riding stable license was on the files, awaiting an inspection.

'Our regular man is off sick. I wonder, Colonel - I know you're a busy man, but you're fully qualified, and I'm sure the hotel wants to get it cleared up before the summer.'

So the Colonel and Steve went back to the Pinecrest Hotel. He refused to take Dora in the sandals and earrings, but he did take Steve in case of trouble.

There was no trouble. He had written authority to inspect the stable. He spent half a day there, with Sidney Hammond following him affably round and thanking him at the end for his time and trouble with a smile like the jaws of a gin trap.

The Colonel turned in an honest and detailed report. It was not his decision whether or not to grant the license.

->*<-

Since last year, when Cobbler's Dream had captured a thief and saved his own life by clearing the impossible spiked park fence, Steve had begun to jump him again.

The Cobbler had once been a famous juvenile show jumper. When the girl who trained him grew too big, he was bought by a hard-handed child who wanted a vehicle for winning championships, rather than a pony to love. Steve worked for her father. He had to see the marvelous pony making mistakes because of the child. Finally he had to see him blinded in one eye by a blow from a whip. He had taken him away then, and brought him to the farm, and they had both stayed here.

The other eye became half blind, but Cobby had adapted so well that he was almost as surefooted as before, and his fantastic leap over the Manor park fence had proved that he had acquired some kind of sixth sense to judge a jump. He would jump almost anything if you took him slow and let him get the feel of it.

Steve put up some sheep hurdles in one of the fields, and he and Dora made a brush jump with gorse stuck through a ladder. Most of the other horses were too old and stiff to jump, so Dora was teaching the mule Willy, who had no mouth at all, and either rushed his jumps flat out or stopped dead and let Dora jump without him.

Steve and Dora had the afternoon off, so they took the Cobbler and Willy through the woods on the other side of their hill, where there were fallen tree trunks across the rides. Cobby jumped them all without checking his canter, bunching his muscles, arching his back, smoothly away on his landing stride with his ears pricked for the next jump. Willy jumped the smaller trees. If they did not reach right across the path, he whipped round them with his mouth open, yawing at the bit. If it were too big, he dug in his toes, and Dora had to get off and lead him over. He would jump his front end, stand and stare with the tree trunk under his middle, and then heave his rear end over with a grunt like an old man getting out of the bath.

Near the far edge of the wood, Cobby shortened his stride, trotting with his head high, and turned to the side, listening.

'What does he hear?'

There were people who came to the woods with guns and shot at rabbits and foxes and anything that moved. Sometimes they shot each other.

Steve and Dora both stopped and listened. Only the continual sigh of the breeze moving through the tops of the tall trees.

'I don't hear anything.'

'Cobb does. His hearing is sharper now that he can't see much. So is his nose.'

The chestnut pony had his nostrils squared, as if he were getting a message.

Steve pushed him on, over two more jumps, but he slowed down again, listening.

'There is something. Let's go the way he wants to.'

They rode out of the wood and along the edge of a cornfield. In a grassy lane beyond the hedge, a grey horse was grazing in a patch of clover.

It was a calm horse. It stood still and exchanged blown breaths with Cobby, and then the ritual squeal and striking out. The mule laid back his long ears like a rabbit and said nothing. He distrusted strange horses. When he was turned out with a new one, he would communicate for the first two weeks only with his heels.

The grey horse wore a head collar. It let Steve slip his belt through the noseband, and trotted quietly beside Cobby back to the farm.

The Colonel did not recognise the horse. 'Someone will be worried though,' he said. 'It's a nice looking horse and well kept.' The grey looked like a hunter, coat clean and silky, whiskers and heels neatly trimmed, tail and mane properly pulled. 'Better ring the police, Steve.'

Sergeant Oddie said at once, 'Oh no! Not that grey again. Look here, I've got the big wedding to worry about, two men off on a drug raid, a three car crash on the Marston road and some nippers have set fire to a bus shelter. That horse is the last thing I need.'

'It's been out before?'

'Time and again. The neighbours are on my neck about it day and night. Regular wasps' nest, it's stirred up. Here, I'll give you Mrs Jordan's number, and I wish you'd tell her how to build a fence to keep a horse in.'

->*<-

'But we have,' Mrs Jordan said. 'It's not our fault, or the horse's. Oh dear. I'll come and get him.'

'I'll ride him home, if you could bring me back,' Steve said.

The grey horse looked a lovely ride, and he was, well schooled, a beautiful mover, quickly responsive, but you could stop him by flexing your wrist.

Steve was surprised when he saw where he came from. The Jordan's house on the edge of a small town had obviously once stood in fields, but new houses had been built close all round, and the fenced paddock was not much bigger than a tennis court. The fence was strong and high enough. The gate looked sound.

'It's they who are doing it,' Mrs Jordan told Steve. 'They used to do it at night, but they're getting bolder now, and they've begun to do it in the daytime if I go out.'

'Who do what?'

'The neighbours. The people in that pink house with gnomes in the garden and plastic flowers in the window boxes. They open the gate and let David out, then they quickly ring the Police and complain that the horse is loose and trampling on people's gardens.'

'How do you know?'

'Oh, I know all right.' Mrs Jordan was a faded, once beautiful woman, with lines of work and worry round her big sad eyes and her full, drooping mouth. 'When the police were here last time - they were nice enough at first, but now they're getting fed up - I saw that front curtain move, and another time, the woman was standing in the window, blatantly watching and laughing.'

'Why don't you padlock the gate?'

'We have. But she somehow pried the rails loose at night, and then got them back up after she'd chased David out. It's her, not her husband. He's not so bad, but she's a fanatic. She hates horses, because she thinks they're something that rich people have. Rich! She's much better off than us. Her husband is a plumber. But she's the kind of person who can't stand anybody having something she hasn't got, even if she doesn't want it. She wants to buy that piece of land where David's paddock is, and breed chinchillas.'

'Chinchillas!' She looked at Steve with her tragic eyes. 'On what was once our back lawn, where the girls used to have their summer house and swings.'

After they had put the grey horse away in the open shed in the corner of the paddock, Mrs Jordan made Steve go into the house for something to eat before she would drive him home. She seemed lonely, glad of someone to talk to. He sat in a comfortable shabby armchair and listened. He had learned from the Colonel that if you will only shut up and listen, people will tell you things they won't tell to someone who is trying to keep up their end of the conversation.

It was a tragic story. Her husband had been a trainer and show judge. A car crash had killed their younger daughter and left him unable to work for a long time. They had to borrow money on their house and land. Their other daughter Nancy left college and went to work, and Mrs Jordan got a job in an old people's nursing home, but they could not pay the interest on the mortgage. Four acres of their land had been seizes, and sold to the builder who had put up all these ugly little houses where the pastures and stables had been.

All the horses had gone, of course, except David, who had belonged to the dead girl.

'How could we part with him? Nancy rides him occasionally, but she has so little time, and she's always so tired. We're all tired, Steve. My husband has a part time job now, but it doesn't pay much, and he's not well enough even for that. I lie awake night after night wondering what will happen when they take our house in the end and that horrible woman gets David's paddock - our last bit of land - and keeps her wretched chinchillas in prison cages.'

'Death row.' Steve nodded. 'Only one way out.'

'I hate her.'

'So do I,' Steve said with feeling, although he had never seen the woman with the plaster gnomes in her garden.

'Sergeant Oddie rang me up after he talked to you, and said if the horse got out again, we'd have to get rid of him.'

'I thought the sergeant was so busy,' Steve said.

'Not too busy to tell me that. And that's what that woman wants.'

'Why don't you turn her in?'

'I can't prove it. She's cunning. I've never been able to catch her.'

'Mind if I try?'

'It's not much use.'

'You all go out some night. Make a big noise about driving off in the car, so she knows. But I'll be here. I'll be in the shed with David.'

No need to tell the Colonel. Not that he would mind, but....no need to worry him.

'I can't risk the trouble,' he had said. He had his own problems with neighbours. 'We've got to stay on the right side of the law.'

Well, this was the right side, but....no need to tell him.

Steve did not tell Dora either, or anyone at the farm.

->*<-

The next evening, after the horses had been bedded down and fed and watered, Steve asked if he could use the truck.

'All right,' the Colonel said. 'What for?'

'I'm going out.'

'Who with?' Dora's rumpled head came over the top of a stable door, where she was rubbing liniment on Dolly's chronic foreleg.

'A girl I know.'

'You don't know any girls.'

'How do you know?'

'You'd tell me.'

Dora rested her chin on the door. Old Doll put her head out beside her and laid back her ears at Steve. She had once been so badly abused by a man that she still only liked women. It was Dolly who had kicked the Colonel in the head.

'You'd be the last person I'd tell.' Steve laughed. 'You'd want to come too, and sit between us and talk all through the film.'

'Are you going to a film?'

'Yes.'

'I want to come too.'

'No.'

'What's her name?'

'Nancy.'

'I don't believe you're going out with a girl,' Dora said, but more doubtfully.

When he drove off, Dora was sitting on the wall by the gate, polishing a snaffle bit and kicking her heels against the bricks. Her face looked closed and sulky, her lower lip stuck out. Steve waved. She did not wave back or look up.

Mr Jordan was a grey stooped man, with a mouth stiffened by pain of body and heart. Nancy was a bright-cheeked girl with thick bouncing hair and good legs, the kind of girl Steve would have gone to the cinema with if he had been going to the cinema with a girl.

They made the necessary noise about leaving. Racing the engine, slamming the doors, going back for a coat, calling out that they would be late.

'The film starts at eight!' Mrs Jordan called from behind the wheel, to let her neighbours know that they would be away at least two hours.

In the pink house with the window-boxes full of impossible flowers that never bloomed in the spring, not even in England at all, a shadow moved behind the curtain.

Steve sat in the straw of the open shed and talked to the grey horse and thought about things long gone. Other nights of adventure when you waited, with your nerves on edge and your hair prickling on your scalp. The night when he had stolen Cobby away to safety with sacking wrapped round his hooves.

About nine-thirty, with the family still in the cinema, David raised his head from his hay and swung his small ears forward. Steve listened, holding his breath.

Were there footsteps on the soft ground? Did the night breeze shiver that bush, or was someone behind it? Steve watched, motionless in the dark corner.

David, who liked people, walked out of the shed in a rustle of straw and into the paddock. A thick woman in tight pants was climbing through the fence. She held out her hand as the horse went up to her and gave him something. In the still night, Steve heard his teeth on the sugar. He followed the woman as she moved quickly across the small paddock to the gate.

Steve waited. It was too dark to see much. She had her back to him, but he heard the clink of the chain on the gate. He got up quickly, went silently up behind her and said in her ear, 'Can I help you?'

'Oh my God!' The woman jumped round with a hand on the ample shelf over her heart. As she moved, Steve was almost sure that he saw her fist clench over a piece of metal that could be a key.

'What do you want?' She was breathing fast, and he could see behind her dark fringe tomorrow's imagined headlines chasing each other through her head.

WOMAN FOUND STRANGLED. HOUSEWIFE KILLED IN NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN. SUBURBAN SLAYING, MYSTERY GROWS.

'What you - what are you doing here?' The woman must be bold to have done as much as she had, but her mouth was twitching now with nerves, because Steve was looming over her threateningly.

'I'm a friend of the family,' he said. 'The horse looked as if he might be headed for colic, so I was watching he didn't lie down. Someone might have slipped him something. People round here have been making trouble, you wouldn't believe it.'

'Oh, I know.' The woman relaxed. 'The poor Jordan's, it's dreadful for them, on top of all their bad luck. I try to keep an eye on things for them, when they're not here. That's why I came out, to check on the gate fastening.'

'Oh, I see,' said Steve. 'To check the gate.'

'That's right.' The woman started to move towards her house. 'To check the gate.'

'You keep an eye on things. That's nice.'

'Well,' she said, 'one does what one can. We were all put in this world to help each other, that's what I say.'

'Oh so do I.' With a hand on the neck of the grey horse, Steve watched the woman climb through the paddock fence and go back into her own house, waggling her bottom righteously, like a good neighbour who has done her duty.

'So that's what you ought to do,' Steve told the Jordan's.

They looked at each other. 'I'm no hand with electricity.' The father looked baffled.

'I'll do it.'

'She'll see you.' Mrs Jordan glanced towards the pink house. 'She sees everything.'

'I'll do it after dark. There's no moon. She won't try anything on tomorrow after the scare she got tonight. If I use a rubber hammer, I can get the insulators on without making a noise, and I'll put the battery behind the shed so she won't hear it ticking.'

Next day, Steve offered to do Anna's shopping, and bought the battery and thin wire and the insulators while he was in town.

In the evening, when he asked casually for the truck, Dora did not ask him where he was going. She had not allowed herself to ask him about the film last night, which was a good thing because he had forgotten to find out what was on.

At the Jordan's he rigged up two strands of electric wire close to the paddock rails where it could not be seen. Then he turned on the battery and waited at the side of the shed.

He chirruped softly. The horse came up to the rail, put out his nose, then jumped back and snorted.

'Sorry, David.' The grey horse stood in the middle of the paddock, looking very offended. 'I had to test it.'

->*<-

Two nights Steve waited in the straw, with the battery ticking softly on the other side of the shed. He dozed and woke and dozed, but he was sleepy in the daytime, and Dora made embittered remarks about people who stayed out so late with girls that they couldn't do their jobs properly.

Why not tell her and let her watch with him in the shed and share the adventure? Because she kept saying things like, 'When are we going to see this famous Nancy? Not that I care. Or is she too hideous to bring here?' Talking herself out of the adventure.

'She's gorgeous, as a matter of fact,' Steve said, irritated. 'Marvelous legs.' He winked at Slugger.

'Can't go far wrong with that.' Slugger winked at the horse he was grooming. ' "When judgin' a woman or a horse, you gotta look at the legs, of course." That's what me Grandad used to say.'

'Anyone can have good legs.' Dora's, which were rather muscular and boyish, were covered in torn faded blue jeans, which she refused to let Anna patch, or hem at the bottom.

On the third night, Steve went to bed early - 'What's the matter? She sick of you already? - and got up again at midnight after everyone was asleep. He stopped the truck before he got to the Jordan's, and walked quietly through what was left of their garden and round the side of the house to the shed.

When he whispered, to show the horse he was there, a voice answered him.

'Nancy?'

'I couldn't sleep.' She was lying covered with straw, only her face and hair showing.

'I wanted to do this alone.' Steve came in and sat beside her.

'Why?'

'It was my idea.'

'It's my horse.'

They lay side by side in the straw and talked softly. Nancy told him about the man at work she thought she was in love with. Girls always started to tell you about other men when you were getting interested.

Steve wriggled his fingers through the straw to find her hand.

'But he's almost old enough to be my father,' Nancy said.

Steve took her hand, and at that moment there was a blood curdling scream from the other side of the paddock.

David jumped. Steve and Nancy scrambled up. The plump woman in the tight pants was sitting on the ground with her arms wrapped round herself like a straitjacket, rocking backwards and forwards and moaning.

'It can't have been that bad.' Steve and Nancy slid carefully under the fence and went across to her.

'Oh, I'm killed,' the woman moaned. 'Oh, my heart - '

'Just going to check up on the gate, eh?'

She looked up at Steve, her hair, disordered from bed, standing wildly up as if the electricity had gone right through it.

'Yes,' she croaked. 'One does what one can. But there are some people - ' she glowered up at Nancy, still rocking and holding herself as if she might fall apart - 'some people who don't know the meaning of the word gratitude.'

After this, Steve did take Nancy to the farm at the weekend, to show her the horses.

The Colonel was delighted with her. He conducted her round himself, hands behind his back, cap over his eyes, very military. Callie was pleased with her because she asked the right questions and said, 'How lucky for Miss to have Callie to look after her,' when they visited Miss America, queening it in the orchard so that the other horses would not disturb the healing wound.

Dora was rather gruff. She took a long look at Nancy's legs, then went off to greet a family of visitors and became very busy giving them a conducted tour of all the horses.

The family, who had only come to see the donkey which had once belonged to their Uncle Fred, kept saying, 'Well, better be getting along,' but Dora dragged them on from horse to horse, so as not to have to talk to Nancy.

Soon after this, Steve got a letter from Mrs Jordan. Their telephone had been cut off because they couldn't pay the bill.

The plump woman and the plumber had put the pink house up for sale and gone away. Two days later - 'If she'd only waited two days, she could have got her revenge in chinchillas' - Mr Jordan was asked by a friend in Australia to go out and join him on the ranch where he was breeding horses.

'So we're all going, Steve. A new life. Free passage out if we stay two years, and they can have this poor house and make it into a pub or bingo hall or whatever they want. No regrets. Except about David. We sail next week. Please find him a good home and use the sale money for the farm. The best home only. I trust you.'

David could stay out at night, so the Colonel let Steve bring him to the farm.

'What's that?' Dora made a face at the grey as he backed neatly out of the horse box and stood with his fine head up and his mane and tail blowing like an Arab, staring at some of the old horses, who were drawn up in the field, all pointing the same way like sheep, observing him.

'It's the horse we found on the other side of the wood. You know.'

'Nancy's horse.'

'Yes,' Steve said. 'They're - '

'It's too long in the back,' Dora said, 'and I don't like the look of that near hock.'

'They're going to Australia. With Nancy.'

'But other than that, it's the best looking horse we've ever had here.' Dora grinned. 'Can we ride him?'

'Till we can find the right home.'

'Let's not start looking yet.'

'We've got to work with him a bit,' they told the Colonel. 'He hasn't worked for so long, we'll have to school him before we can show him to anyone.'

And every day when the Colonel, during his morning rounds, asked, 'You got a prospect for that grey?', they said, 'He's still a bit tricky. We want him perfect.'

David was already perfect. They had never had such a marvelous horse to ride. They were not going to let him go in a hurry.

'Got to work with him a bit longer.'

->*<-

Callie had dreaded going back to school, but when the summer term started, Lewis seemed to have been converted by the glories of Easter, because he left Callie alone and did not bully her.

She watched him from a distance. He was strangely quiet. He did not make a dead set for the new, younger ones, as he usually did, twisting their arms to see if they would cry, knocking into them in the cafeteria to make them drop their food.

'School isn't so bad,' Callie told Anna. 'Perhaps I will stay.'

'Take the scholarship exam anyway.' Anna was used to Callie's frequent changes of mind. Tomorrow school might be no good again.

But tomorrow, Callie actually had a conversation with Lewis the louse.

They were in the library, where you were not supposed to talk, but they were behind a stack of shelves and Mrs Dooley was busy at the far desk.

Lewis had taken down a book and opened it, but he did not seem able to read. Callie was searching for something in an index. She was aware that Lewis was watching her, so she looked up and smiled nervously.

To her amazement he smiled back, his lower lip hanging on his face like a hammock, his teeth as pointed as his father's, but with gaps from fighting.

'What you do in the holidays then? he asked.

Callie was so surprised and flummoxed that she could not think of anything.

'Oh - nothing much. I rode. I worked most of the time in the stables. I helped Steve build a gate.'

'Who's Steve?'

'The boy who works at the farm.'

'Oh, yeah.' Lewis nodded, remembering.

'He did a marvelous thing.' Callie babbled on, making the most of the chance to get on the right side of the Louse. 'He foiled a woman.'

'Foiled?' Lewis's mouth hung. His vocabulary was not very large.

Callie told him about the woman letting out David and then ringing the police. He listened, his slow dull eyes following the movement of her face, breathing through his mouth like a patient under anaesthetic.

'Who's talking there? Mrs Dooley came round the end of the bookshelves. Lewis had disappeared. There was only Callie there to take a discipline mark.

->*<-

Two nights later, the door of the Mongolian horse's loose box was open, and Trotsky wandered across a field of young wheat, eating it as he went and occasionally lying down for a crushing roll.

'Good thing he didn't have shoes on,' the Colonel said nervously to the farmer.

'Good thing I wasn't out there with a gun,' the farmer said grimly.

Trotsky was wily enough to undo a latch if the bolts were not fastened.

'But I know I bolted Trots' door,' Dora said. 'And the bottom bolt too, because he bit me while I was bending down.'

'Someone opened it then,' Steve said. 'Like the Jordan's neighbour.'

Callie kept her mouth shut, which was how she should have kept it behind the library shelves. Was it possible that she had put this idea for new trouble into the Louse's thick head?

He left her alone. She told her mother she was definitely not going to take the exam. But when Lewis saw she was off her guard, he invited her one day to go with him and buy a chocolate cornet before it was time for her bus.

She went. They never got to the ice cream van. As soon as they were round the corner from the school, Lewis pulled her into the overgrown garden of an empty house and knocked her backwards into the bushes. She picked herself up and was going to run away, but he grabbed her.

'That's just the beginning.' He stared at her with his horrible revolting slab of face.

'What for?'

'Stopping us getting a license.'

'What do you mean?'

'Your stepfather. The Sergeant, the Bosun, whatever his daft name is. He done it.'

'It was nothing to do with the Colonel. He only sent the County Council a report on your stable.'

'He wouldn't know one end of a stable from the other.' Lewis was gripping her arm so hard that she would scream if it went on. 'Much less a horse.'

'Let me go!'

'He's got it in for us. Trying to keep an honest man from earning a crust of bread, my Dad says. We've lost a lot of bookings, you know.' His gorilla brow came down threateningly. 'People come to us for the riding.'

'Why don't you clean the place up and apply for another license?' Callie bit her lip. Her arm was going numb. She would not scream.

'There's nothing wrong with our place,' Lewis growled. 'It's your stepfather, that's who there's something wrong with. We'd ought to put him out of business too. Perhaps we will. Yeah.' He dropped her arm, frowning under the weight of what passed for thoughts. 'Perhaps we will. My Dad says it's a crime to keep them poor old horses alive against their will.'

'It's not against their will!' Callie could have run now, but she stayed to argue, rubbing her arm. 'They're all fit enough to enjoy life. The Colonel says it's wrong to take life from an animal while he can still use it.

'A crime against Nature.' The Louse was obviously echoing his father. 'Shouldn't be allowed.'

'We save horses! We saved your horse because you were too cruel and stupid - '

Lewis pulled back his arm and took an open-handed swipe at her, and she ran, ducking through the bushes until she was out on the road where there were people.

When she got home, she kept her sleeve down over her bruised arm and explained her scratches by telling her mother that she had got off the bus halfway up the hill for exercise, and taken a short cut through the brambles.

She told the Colonel that the Pinecrest Hotel had been refused a license to run a riding stable.

'Thank God,' the Colonel said. 'There is some sense to the Town Hall after all.'

'I'll bet they wish they could put you out of business too.' Callie watched his face to see how he would take that.

'Oh, I don't think so.' In spite of all the cruelty and ignorance he had seen in his work for horses, the Colonel still believed the best of people, right up to the time he discovered the worst.

'And I've decided,' Callie told Anna and the Colonel - the pain of her arm kept reminding her - 'that I do want to go away to that school.'

'Your name's still on the exam list,' Anna said. 'I didn't keep asking Miss Crombie to take it off every time you changed your mind.'

'Suppose I don't get the scholarship?'

'Miss Crombie thinks you have a very good chance.'

->*<-

One of the disastrous things that people did was to give their small children day-old chicks for Easter. Dear little fluffy yellow Easter chicks. You could buy them in cut-price stores.

Some of them fell out of the paper bags and were stepped on or run over in the crowded street. Some of them were crushed to death by hot little hands soon after they got home. Some died of cold. Some died of the wrong food. Some died of not bothering to live.

The few who survived were either given away when they grew into chickens, or kept in a cellar or a cupboard, or even the bath, until the people got sick of it and gave them away or killed them, or the chickens got sick of it and died. It was a total disaster for all concerned.

This Easter, a town family had staged an even bigger disaster.

Their little daughter was 'mad about' horses, and so when she woke up on Easter morning, the car was standing in the road and there was a horse in the garage.

It was not much of a horse. The family had bought it quite cheaply at a sale. It had a big coffin head, lumps on its legs, a scrubby mane and tail and large flat feet that had not seen a blacksmith for a long time.

'My horsie!' They had bought an old bridle with the horse, and they put it on back to front with the brow band where the throat latch should be and the reins crossed under its neck, and the little girl climbed on, rode away down the middle of the road and fell off before she got to the corner.

She hit her head and was in bed for two weeks, and the horse went back to the garage in disgrace.

Now and then when someone remembered, they fed it a soup can of oats, which it could not chew properly, because it had a loose tooth hanging at the side of its mouth. It had no hay, because they thought hay was only for the winter, and no bedding, because they did not know about bedding. There was a small patch of grass behind the garage, and the horse ate that bare, and then licked the ground.

When the little girl was better, she got on the horse again with her friend and the two of them rode round and round on a patch of waste land, clutching the mane and each other and shrieking with joy. Finally, the horse stumbled and fell down, and the children tumbled off, which seemed the easiest way to get down, and a great joke too.

The floor of the garage was concrete and the walls were concrete blocks, sweating a chill damp. When the horse lay down, which it did more often as it grew weaker, it rubbed sores on its ankles and hocks.

If it was lying down when she came home from school, the little girl would get it up by holding the soup can of oats a little way off. When it stood up, she would take the oats away and put on the bridle.

'Work before food, Rusty dear,' she would tell it, and she and her friend would take Rusty to play circus on the piece of waste ground.

She was devoted to the horse. She sang to it. She made daisy chains to hang on its ear. She brushed it with her old hairbrush, but she could not get it very clean, because she did not like the smell of manure, and so she did not clean out the garage, although she told her father she did.

Her father hardly ever went to look at the horse, but he was very proud about it, and told everyone at work how his little girl thought the world of Rusty and it would do your heart good.

The mother did not look at the horse very much, because she was afraid of horses, and said she was allergic to them, which she thought was quite a grand thing to be, and she also did not like the smell that was accumulating in the garage.

But her little girl was happy, and she thought it was a lovely thing for a kiddie to have a faithful pet.

The faithful horse was willing enough to keep going somehow, although he was very thin and lumps of his hair fell out, and he was becoming dehydrated from only having small amounts of water, which the little girl brought him in a seaside toy bucket.

One day when she and her friend were riding him proudly down the road to the pillar box, slapping his ribs to keep him moving, he stopped and lay down in the road with his nose resting on the kerb. All the shrieks and wails and kisses and smacks of the children and the shouts of some masons who were building a wall and the advice of housewives who came out of their houses and flapped their aprons could not get him up.

It happened that the Colonel and Anna were taking a detour across the end of this road to avoid rush hour traffic. They saw the excitement, and turned the car up the street to see what it was.

The Colonel walked through the small crowd and stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets, watching the little girls swarming round the horse like distressed bees, patting it and kissing it and begging it, Rusty dear, to get up. The Colonel looked at the horse and the horse looked at the Colonel, and a message passed between them like old friends.

When the Colonel had got authority to take the horse, he telephoned for Steve to come with the horse box.

'But I don't understand.' The mother had taken the little girl home and the father was back from work and standing non-plussed in the road, where street lamps were coming on and the masons had knocked off for the day and the housewives and the other children had gone indoors. 'She loved that horse like her own brother. Thought the world of him, it would do your heart good.'

'I'm sorry.' The Colonel was sitting on the kerb in his best suit with the horse's head in his lap. 'But a small child can't be left to take care of a horse.'

'But we didn't know!'

'Famous last words,' the Colonel muttered. 'People who don't know anything about horses should stick to goldfish.'

'That's a good idea.' The man began to cheer up. He was glad he was going to be able to garage his car again, anyway. 'I'll get her a bowl of fish tomorrow. Take her mind off it. They soon forget, the kiddies.'

He went back to tell his wife and daughter the new idea. The Colonel took off the jacket of his best suit and laid it over the rump of the horse, who lay like a heap of road menders' sand in the shadows between the street lamps.

->*<-

At the Farm, the Colonel pulled out Rusty's loose tooth by rubbing the opposite gum to make that side more sensitive, and then quickly tapping out the tooth with a small hammer.

'Bran mashes now?' Steve let go of the bluish tongue, which he had been holding out to the side to keep the horse's mouth open.

'Give him anything he'll eat, if he'll eat.' The Colonel got up from the straw where Rusty was lying. 'He hasn't got much longer.'

'Will he die?' From the doorway, Callie saw the horse through a glittery haze of tears.

The Colonel nodded. That was the message that had passed between him and the horse in the road.

I am dying.

You shall die in peace.

->*<-

Lewis went back to bullying the younger ones, and Callie kept clear of him. If she could keep out of his way until the end of term, she would be safe and free.

The week before she was to take the scholarship exam, she went early to school for some extra study with Miss Crombie. 'Not that I want to lose you next year, Callie, but I shall be thrilled if you do well.' Miss Crombie flushed and scratched her head with the pencil she wore through her hair like Madam Butterfly. She had a pretty boring life and not much to be thrilled about.

When Callie was in the cloakroom, she heard shouting in the yard outside, and running feet. The bigger boys never came so early, but there was a pack of them, galloping across the empty yard like hounds after a fox. She could not see what they were chasing, but whatever it was had dashed into the bicycle shed and bolted the door.

Whooping and shrieking, the boys attacked the shed with feet and stones and bits of wood. One of them broke a window. It was Lewis, of course, climbing on the bicycle rack and putting in the boot with a crash of glass.

Callie watched, paralysed. She had heard about a girl in New York being stabbed in the street while people hurried past or watched from their windows, and would not do anything to help. Now her she was, just as cowardly herself. Don't get mixed up. Keep clear.

Lewis was too big to climb through the window. He and the others went round to attack the shed from the back. As Callie heard the glass of the back window break, the door of the shed burst open and a little spindly boy, legs going like the spokes of a wheel, ran for his life across the yard. The boys were already round the shed and gaining on him as he wrenched open a door and got inside the school.

Help him, Callie. But she could not move. The boys were at the outside door as the little boy rushed into the cloakroom, gasping and wild-eyed.

'They're after me!' He could hardly speak.

Don't get mixed up. Keep clear. 'I can't - this is the girls' - ' she began, but the child stammered, 'Save me!' and without thought, she pushed him into her open locker and shut the door.

It locked automatically. It was a tiny space, but the child was tiny, and there were air holes at the top to let out the smell of hockey boots and gym shoes.

Feet clattered on the stone stairs, and Lewis was in the cloakroom with three or four grinning cannibals behind him.

'Well, look who's here.' Lewis began to throw coats and scarves about, looking for the little boy.

'Get out of here.' Callie held herself tense so that the trembling of her body would not reach her voice. 'You're not allowed in here.'

'Who cares?' Lewis began to try the doors of the lockers, pulling out stuff from the open ones, while his mob tore clothes off the hooks and threw shoes and tennis rackets about, just for the mess of it.

'Where's that mucky kid?' Lewis was looking through the air holes in the lockers. What would happen when a pair of terrified eyes met his? What would happen when he saw it was Callie's locker and went at her for the key? It was round her neck on a string. He would probably strangle her.

'What's he done?' If she could just keep them talking, someone would come.

'Croaked to a teacher. Got us in trouble.' A gym shoe, a purse, a stuffed bear flew out of a locker over his shoulder.

'Why?'

For answer, he tore the photograph of a boy from the back of a door, crumpled it up and threw it in her face.

He was getting near her locker. Her hand went up to the key string at her neck. 'There's no - ' she said, there's no one - '

'Shut up.' Lewis took hold of Callie's long pigtails, wrapped them round her throat and pulled the ends.

Choking, Callie looked desperately out of the window. Then she saw a miracle, right before her anguished eyes. Big bold Betty Rundle, goal for the hockey team, was rolling in early across the yard. The boys saw her too. Lewis let go of Callie's hair, and they ran. Coughing, Callie pulled the child out of her locker, and dragged him - he could hardly walk for cramp - down the corridor and round a corner before Betty Rundle kicked open the outside door and came whistling down the stairs.

Miss Crombie was angry, puffed in the face. 'What's the point of me getting here early if you can't bother to come early too?' She was never at her best in the morning.

'The bus was late,' Callie said faintly. Her throat still hurt.

'It's for your sake, not mine,' Miss Crombie went on without listening. 'Now hurry up and let's go through that French translation before the pagan hordes arrive.'

While she read aloud, misreading some of her own words so that they sounded like mistakes, Callie thought about the little boy as she had left him sitting alone in his empty classroom, sheltering behind an oversize desk as if it was a fortress. After he had told the teacher about his books being thrown in the pond, Lewis had lain in wait for him one morning last week and bent back his fingers behind a bus shelter. That was why the boy came to school early.

'But not early enough for him,' he told Callie.

His name was Toby. He was about ten - no one at home remembered his birthday - but undersized, with weak, skinny legs and a large shaggy head on which his ears stuck out like the handles on a porridge bowl. He was a weird-lokking child, like a goblin changeling. Callie hoped she would not get mixed up with him again.

'Don't leave me,' he had said, when she put him into his classroom.

'Oh, look. I only hid you to save my own skin.'

'You live up the hill, don't you?' His pointed big-eyed face was like a marmoset. 'So do I. What bus do you get home?'

When she told him, he said, 'I'll wait after my last class and go with you.'

'Oh, look.' She did not want to get mixed up with this child.

->*<-

********************

'I'd be safe with you, see?' Sitting at the desk that was too big for him, he had nodded confidently, as if Callie was as big as Betty Rundle, and as bold.

He was waiting for her. He waited every day and chattered by her side on the bus. In the morning, he was on the early bus, with his face unwashed and his socks in holes on his dangling legs, his books on the seat to keep a place for her.

He chattered while she was trying to read, telling her things about his home and his cats and his brothers and sisters who were bigger than he was - even the younger one - because he had been ill.

'They gave me up for dead,' he said cheerfully. 'I heard them say so in the hospital.'

The exam was only two days away. Callie swotted all the time.

'Why are you always reading?' Toby asked her when she only grunted at his twentieth question about the horses at the Farm, which fascinated him.

She told him about the scholarship. 'If I get it, I'll be out of this rotten school next term.'

Toby said nothing. This was so unusual that Callie looked at him. Tears stood in his big eyes, and his mouth drooped at the corners.

Why should she feel guilty? It was her life, not his. But she did. Before they got to the top of the hill, she told him he could get off the bus with her and see the horses.

Steve was very nice to Toby. He picked him up so he could see over the half doors. He took him on his shoulder out to the fields and let him open gates and hold them for horses coming through. When Cobbler's Dream came in, he put a saddle and bridle on him and let Toby ride in the jump field.

On the ground, the child was topheavy and misshapen, but on the pony, he did not look odd at all. He sat well by instinct, held the reins the way he was told, and learned the rhythm of rising after Cobby had trotted carefully round a few times on the lunge rein.

'Never seen anyone get it so quick.'

Toby grinned with his mouthful of bad teeth. When Steve lifted him down, he clung to the Chestnut pony's neck, went into the stable with him, pressed his big head to his strong chest while he was eating, and had to be prised away by force for Steve to take him home.

Callie went with them. Toby lived in a tumbledown sort of cottage with thin prowling cats and decrepit vegetables and a collection of rubbish and old cooking pots and broken furniture outside, as if there had been a fire.

His mother came out, holding a baby which was dribbling at the mouth and nose. 'Where the hell have you been? Her voice began to lash at Toby before he had opened the gate, lifting it creaking on its one hinge.

Steve explained. The mother still looked grim, partly because she had not got her teeth in.

'He can come back any time,' Paul said.

'We'll see,' the mother said ungraciously.

Next morning on the bus, Callie was reding history.

'I hope you get bottom marks in everything,' Toby said.

'I'll die if I do.'

'I'll die if you go away,' he said, not in sorrowing self pity; just a statement of fact.

When the examination came, it was like preparing a horse for a show. There was a special supper the night before. Callie washed her hair and cut her toenails and went early to bed with hot milk. Her mother was up early to cook her a big breakfast, and everyone came from the stables to say goodbye - 'As if I was going to my execution.'

Toby behaved as if she was. 'This is my worst day,' he kept saying. 'This is the worst bloody day I ever had in my whole life.'

When Callie left him at his classroom, where she always had to take him because of Lewis, she said, 'Wish me luck,' but Toby only looked at her as if she were a traitor.

'Good Luck!' Miss Crombie patted her on the back outside the examination room. 'I know you can do well.'

And when Callie saw the first paper, she knew she could too.

Waiting to see exam questions is one of the worst times in life, doomed, sick, your brain empty of everything you ever learned. The papers are passed out. You turn them over. Your eye scans quickly down and you see, yes, yes, one after the other, things you know, things you have revised, favourite things - two you have never heard of, but there's enough choice without them - and then it is your day.

It was Callie's day. She picked up her pen, squared her elbows, smiled at the invigilator, who did not smile back for fear of cheating, and wrote her name beautifully at the top of the beautiful clean paper. Question No. 1: Name the six wives of Henry VIII and say what you know of each.

Easy, easy. Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard, Katherine Parr. She knew them backwards in her sleep.

She began to write: 'Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymore...'

The image of Toby's face, pinched, pale grubby, the big marmoset eyes and the pointed chin, lay on the white sheet of paper.

'I'll die if you go away.'

Callie sighed, crossed out her first words, and began to write again:

'Katherine Taragon, Ann Seymour, Marie Antoinette, Katherine the Great, Bloody Mary, Katherine Dubarry.'

No one could understand it. They called it bad luck, an off day, stage fright. Miss Crombie was upset enough even to call her stupid.

'You knew most of those questions. They were tailormade for you.'

'I lost my head.'

'And lost the scholarship.' Miss Crombie was bitterly disappointed.

'I don't really mind. I never did want to go to boarding school.'

'I mind,' Miss Crombie said. 'And I mind for your mother.'

'She didn't really want me to go away.'

Follyfoot ch13

Toby said, 'I knew you wouldn't get it. But I'm glad you didn't.'

Callie did not know whether to be glad or sorry. She had thrown away her chance - but was it worth it? At school, there was not much she could do to help Toby. It was actually worse for him to be a friend of someone whom Lewis hated as much as he hated Callie.

Once when he tripped Toby up in the corridor, Toby managed to bite him as he scrambled up. The Louse had teeth marks on his hand.

Callie saw them, and jeered. 'He's got rabies, didn't you know? Ooh look - you're foaming!' and ran into the crowd.

Toby came quite often to the Farm to ride. Cobby could be a bouncing, jet-propelled handful when Steve got him on his toes to jump, but he was clever enough to know when to take quiet care of a rider. He had once worked for a paralysed girl, walking by himself into a pit so that she could heave herself from her wheelchair on to his back.

Riding David, Steve took Toby along the top of the hills, through woods and fields and ferny lanes where he had never been before, because his legs would not carry him far. Colour came to his cheeks and his muscles grew stronger. Even his mother, who never admitted optimism, was forced to say that it might be doing him good.

One evening when Callie brought him back to the Farm, he said he could not ride.

'I hurt my hand.' He had it in the pocket of his droopy shorts which were handed down from someone bigger.

'Let's see.' Steve took out the hand.

'Nothing much.'

Steve gently unwound a blood-soaked handkerchief. The nail of one finger was torn off down to the quick.

'Why didn't you go to the nurse?' Anna asked, when she was cleaning the finger and bandaging it.

'I dunno.' He kept his eyes down.

'Did Lewis do that?' Callie asked.

'Who's Lewis?' asked her mother.

'That boy from Pinecrest. You know. The one who is our enemy because of Miss America, and the stable licence. He's Toby's enemy too.'

'Surely he wouldn't do a thing like that to a little boy?' Like her husband, Anna had an enduring faith in human nature, sometimes ill-founded.

The day when he was chased like a small animal, running for his life into the bicycle shed, had taught Toby not to tell tales to grownups. But he told Steve how Lewis had caught him on one of the swings and twisted it, jamming his finger between the chains.

Next day, when Steve had finished the morning work in the stables, he went down the hill to the school.

Callie had told him that some of the big boys went down to the end of the playing fields for a smoke after lunch. Steve hid in the bushes, rubbing his knuckles.

Half a dozen boys came down and lounged about for a while, talking in grunts and guffaws, making grubby jokes about the teachers. Steve recognised the Louse's voice, oozing thick and stupid through his adenoids.

Steve crouched, then suddenly leaped out and grappled with him. Surprised, Lewis went down, and they rolled over and over, punching and kicking and scratching and hurting each other in any way they could.

As Steve had expected, the other boys were too yellow to join in. They watched for a while, circling the desperate fight like dogs. Then when Lewis began to scream as Steve was on top of him rubbing his face into the ground, they ran off.

Cursing, his face smeared with earth and blood, Lewis somehow scrambled up. Before he could get away, Steve caught him with a fist on the side of the jaw and the Louse went down like a felled tree.

Steve wiped his face on his sleeve, rubbed off his hands on the grass and ran them over his curly hair. He found a piece of paper in his pocket, and left a scribbled note tucked behind the ear of the snoring boy.

'You want more of the same? Try starting anything with the little kids.'

Follyfoot Ch 14 pt1

Nothing happened for a while. The Louse was away from school for the rest of the week. Steve had a scratched face and a lot of bruises and Callie got up very early, did all his stables for him and brought him a mug of tea in bed.

The grey stable cat had three kittens. They were keeping the prettiest one with the Elizabethan ruff of white fur round its face, and a home had been found for the other two at a village grocery whose storeroom needed the protection of this famous family of mousers.

On Sunday evening, Steve put the kittens in a canvas shoulder bag and rode Cobby to the village, trotting along the side of the road in the gathering dusk.

The grocery people insisted on giving him a snack - he was the kind of boy whom women instinctively fed, not to fatten him, but to mother him - and it was almost dark by the time he started for home.

Dark, light, sunlight, grey shadows, it didn't make much difference to the Cobbler with his half sight, especially on a road he knew so well.

He trotted steadily, ears constantly moving, alertly forward, swivelling back, one forward and one back, because he depended so much on his hearing.

Steve rode half dreaming, the empty bag swinging at his hip. He knew the feel of the pony so well that it was almost like the movement of his own body. He sat relaxed, with a loose rein, not bothering to rise to the smooth trot, fancying himself a cowhand, legs stuck out in chaps, shoulders slack, single-footing through the desert sagebrush behind a herd of lowing cattle, going leisurely to the water hole.

The motorbike came out of nowhere, with no light. It threw itself at them round a corner and roared by so close that Steve saw the rider's face in the instant before Cobby reared, slipped on the road and came down hard, with Steve underneath.

His leg was pinned under the saddle. The pony struggled, and at last the weight of him lifted and he was up. Steve did not even try to get up. He did not try to move his leg. He was cold and sweating at the same time, with lead in his stomach and a sick spinning head, and he knew that something was badly broken.

He raised his head to try and look at his leg, lying with the foot at a strange angle, then quickly dropped his head on the ground and kept it there until the blood came singing back into his ears and he knew that he would not faint.

In books when a rider lies hurt on the ground, his faithful horse lowers its head, nosing him gently, and he whispers into its ear, 'Go home!'

In life, things don't work out like that. Cobbler's Dream was a few yards away at the side of the road, his foot through the reins, tearing at the long grass as if he had not had a decent meal for weeks.

Steve whistled to him. He moved on, contentedly grazing. It was almost dark now. Paul could barely see the rounded outline of his quarters, moving steadily away.

No cars came by. Steve's leg had been shocked numb at first, but now feeling was coming back, and with it pain. If a car did not stop soon, he would have to start screaming. If the Louse's big brother came back on the motorbike to see how much damage he had done, he would have to shout to him for help.

Someone must help. Anyone. Help me. 'Cobby!' he shouted, his face in the long grass.

'Who's there?' A high, nervous voice, some way down the road.

'Help!'

A small dog yapped. Feet on the road. Then they stopped - 'Help!' - came on again. Then a hysterical tongue was licking at his face and Steve grabbed the little dog tightly, in a sweat of panic that it would touch his leg.

'What's happened?' A woman walked round and stood in front of him, staring down, her hand in her mouth. She looked in a panic too.

'I've broken my leg.'

The woman gasped and knelt down.

'Don't touch it!' Steve shrieked. She pulled back her hands and got up.

'I'll run back and get help. I live quite near. You stay there,' she added unnecessarily and ran, feet fading down the road, the dog yapping and yipping as if something marvellous had happened.

Steve closed his eyes and began to groan.

Follyfoot Ch 14 pt 2

He was in a small hospital in the town where the Jordans had lived among the harassing new neighbours. His leg was in plaster to the thigh. It was very uncomfortable, and 'Yes, it does hurt,' he answered to the question that everybody asked.

The Colonel was furious. He was usually easygoing, a peacemaker; but after what Paul told him, he wanted to steam right down to the Pinecrest Hotel and tell soapy Sidney Hammond what he thought of his rotten, vicious, ugly son Todd.

'No, don't.' Steve closed his eyes. It still made his head ache if anyone raised their voice. 'It was an accident.'

'That's not what you told me when you came out of the anaesthetic. You said it was deliberate. He came at you without lights and practically knocked the pony over. He probably did knock him over.'

'He slipped.'

'What difference?' The Colonel picked up his hat and stick. 'I'm going to tell that two-faced swine - '

'Then he'll tell you what I - what I - oh hell. What I did.'

'What did you do?' The Colonel's voice dropped with a sigh from indignation to resigned patience.

'It was a revenge thing. I'd beaten up his younger brother. You know,' he added hopefully, as if he could persuade the Colonel that he had already heard about the fight, and had not minded.

'I thought you weren't going to get into any more fights, Steve.'

'I can't now.' Steve closed his eyes again and lay like a corpse in a coffin. The Colonel put a hand on his forehead and went away.

Follyfoot Ch 15 pt1

Steve came back from the hospital with his leg still cocooned in the long heavy plaster, scrawled over with messages from the nurses.

'Behave yourself - Cathy.'

'Good luck from Rosalita.'

'Mary Ellen - don't come back.'

'Love always Susie' and a heart with an arrow.

He could move about slowly with crutches. He spent one day sitting in the garden with his radio and various dogs and cats who were glad to find someone sitting still, and Anna bringing him things to eat and drink