Mars the ruby-coloured, must have been pointing his brilliant stave straight down the chimney of that room where Anita Stark lay, her hair sombre against the white pillows. And what a Mars! … Sometimes with the face of a giant, sometimes a large and yet inordinately active policeman, sometimes a grinning sergeant, once a slim English officer with a slimmer yet wicked cane. The shapes of war, one after another, formed and dissolved round the sleeping child’s head. From under the pines, Wylde Stark’s Indian game-cocks crew their insolent and brassy challenge. The morning arrived pale and repentant. But the thing was done.

. . .

There were two moments in his life—one of sheer delight, one tinged with fear and a curious satisfaction. The delightful moment arrived when his father daily commanded him to let the horses out of the stable for their morning drink at the dam. The mornings, hazy over wide yellow fields, broken only by silhouetted pines and a blue circle of the inevitable New Zealand hills far away, smelt sharply of frosty soil; little puddles in the stable-yard frozen over with ice that tasted cold and slippery like glass; horse-dung trodden into the mire and yet gentled with the smell of warm straw. He let the big working horses out first, their breath wreathing blue as tobacco-smoke around their snorting velvet nostrils. Then he attended to the racehorses, of whom he particularly worshipped Avenal Lady. She was a chestnut girl, and his first love. He took the greatest pains in sleeking her beautiful long body, with the haughty arches of her ribs and the taper of her legs into satiny white stockings. The chestnut mare, recognizing perhaps a colour as temperamental as her own, blew frosty breath into the little boy’s face and beamed on him with her arch amber eye.

Avenal Lady’s lines of speed and grace were all the beauty the little boy could understand. He knew a good deal about races already, his father being known as one of the lucky owners of the Canterbury Plains, and the use to which her taut muscles in their wary satin sheath could be put was perfectly plain to his five years. But there was something more about her when she stood poised, reared up like a plume of fire, like a sheaf of tawny grain. She was triumphant in her beauty, and that was what the little boy very badly wanted to be himself.

He wasn’t supposed to be present at the cock-fighting, but the very thought of it made a salt taste like blood come on his tongue, and his small body could wriggle between the legs of the Invercargill men—some of them the toughest old sports in town. Cock-fighting, which was of course illegal, was not to be had outside the stable-yards of the Governor Grey Hotel. Wylde Stark had imported the Indian game-cocks, and a wizened little silversmith went to great trouble manufacturing and engraving their inch-long spurs of chased silver. Nothing was too good for the Stark gamecocks, and they flaunted their magnificence, strutting three feet high, great arrogant fowls, their plumage ruby and black, their feathered trousers sprayed out, absurdly like cowboy pants, around those deadly striking feet. The cock-fights were duels, usually to the death; and the little boy never found anything but excitement and joy in them until one day a cock with its eye torn out refused to die, but flapped round and round the ring, helpless among the legs of the black-trousered, red-faced males. Then he ran away.*

It should be possible for the son of a Delaware Indian to live from day to day, stolidly forgetting all except the needs and resources of the instincts. Did it come from Madrid, the shadowy faculty of being able to see again, to remember with a sometimes terrible distinctness, the strange things and the cruel ones just as they happened?

. . .

His father’s face was set like a rock. He said: ‘You’re going to put them on, don’t worry.’ And James Douglas Stark—his name now contracted to the popular version, Doug—squirmed again, but didn’t weep. Neither tears nor argument was the faintest use against his father. The rebel had two choices, to be trodden underfoot or to give battle. From the time when he could walk he had preferred to give battle.

Then a rope flicked out like a black snake and pulled him shrieking away from the fence to which he clung.