short o' cash as a roadside pauper. And that fool Kimble says the
newspaper's talking about peace. Why, the country wouldn't have a
leg to stand on. Prices 'ud run down like a jack, and I should
never get my arrears, not if I sold all the fellows up. And there's
that damned Fowler, I won't put up with him any longer; I've told
Winthrop to go to Cox this very day. The lying scoundrel told me
he'd be sure to pay me a hundred last month. He takes advantage
because he's on that outlying farm, and thinks I shall forget him."

The Squire had delivered this speech in a coughing and interrupted
manner, but with no pause long enough for Godfrey to make it a
pretext for taking up the word again. He felt that his father meant
to ward off any request for money on the ground of the misfortune
with Wildfire, and that the emphasis he had thus been led to lay on
his shortness of cash and his arrears was likely to produce an
attitude of mind the utmost unfavourable for his own disclosure.
But he must go on, now he had begun.

"It's worse than breaking the horse's knees--he's been staked and
killed," he said, as soon as his father was silent, and had begun
to cut his meat. "But I wasn't thinking of asking you to buy me
another horse; I was only thinking I'd lost the means of paying you
with the price of Wildfire, as I'd meant to do. Dunsey took him to
the hunt to sell him for me the other day, and after he'd made a
bargain for a hundred and twenty with Bryce, he went after the
hounds, and took some fool's leap or other that did for the horse at
once. If it hadn't been for that, I should have paid you a hundred
pounds this morning."

The Squire had laid down his knife and fork, and was staring at his