That same afternoon a small troop of horsemen came riding into the yard, with two of the captured Fringes leaders in the middle of them.
I dropped what I was doing, and ran across to see. It was a bit disappointing at first sight. The tales about the Fringes had led me to expect creatures with two heads, or fur all over, or half a dozen arms and legs. Instead, they seemed at first glance to be just two ordinary men with beards - though unusually dirty, and with very ragged clothes. One of them was a short man with fair hair which was tufted as though he had trimmed it with a knife. But when I looked at the other I had a shock which brought me up dumbfounded, and staring at him. I was so jolted I just went on staring at him, for, put him in decent clothes, tidy up his beard, and he’d be the image of my father….
As he sat his horse, looking round, he noticed me; casually at first, in passing, then his gaze switched back and he stared hard at me. A strange look that I did not understand at all came into his eyes….
He opened his mouth as if to speak, but at that moment people came out of the house — my father, with his arm still in a sling, among them — to see what was going on.
I saw my father pause on the step and survey the group of horsemen, then he, too, noticed the man in the middle of them. For a moment he stood staring, just as I had done — then all his colour drained away, and his face went blotchy grey.
I looked quickly at the other man. He was sitting absolutely rigid on his horse. The expression on his face made something clutch suddenly in my chest. I had never seen hatred naked before, the lines cut deep, the eyes glittering, the teeth suddenly looking like a savage animal’s. It struck me with a slap, a horrid revelation of something hitherto unknown, and hideous; it stamped itself on my mind so that I never forgot it….
Then my father, still looking as though he were ill, put out his good hand to steady himself against the door-post, and turned back into the house.
One of the escort cut the rope which held the prisoner’s arms. He dismounted, and I was able to see then what was wrong with him. He stood some eighteen inches taller than anyone else, but not because he was a big man. If his legs had been right, he would have stood no taller than my father’s five-feet-ten; but they were not: they were monstrously long and thin, and his arms were long and thin, too. It made him look half-man, half-spider….
His escort gave him food and a pot of beer. He sat down on a bench, and his bony knees stuck up to seem almost level with his shoulders. He looked round the yard, noticing everything as he munched his bread and cheese. In the course of his inspection he perceived me again. He beckoned. I hung back, pretending not to see. He beckoned again. I became ashamed of being afraid of him. I went closer, and then a little closer still, but keeping warily out of range, I judged, of those spidery arms.
‘What’s your name, boy?’ he asked.
‘David,’ I told him. ‘David Strorm.’
He nodded, as if that were satisfactory.
‘The man at the door, with his arm in a sling, that would be your father, Joseph Strorm?’
‘Yes,’ I told him.
Again he nodded. He looked round the house and the outbuildings.
‘This place, then, would be Waknuk?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said again.
I don’t know whether he would have asked more, for at that point somebody told me to clear off. A little later they all remounted, and soon they moved away, the spidery man with his arms tied together once more. I watched them ride off in the Kentak direction, glad to see them go. My first encounter with someone from the Fringes had not, after all, been exciting; but it had been unpleasantly disturbing.
I heard later that both the captured Fringes men managed to escape that same night. I can’t remember who told me, but I am perfectly certain it was not my father. I never once heard him refer to that day, and I never had the courage to ask him about it….
Then scarcely, it seemed, had we settled down after the invasion and got the men back to catching up with the farm work, than my father was in the middle of a new row with my half-uncle, Angus Morton.
Differences of temperament and outlook had kept them intermittently at war with one another for years. My father had been heard to sum up his opinion by declaring that if Angus had any principles they were of such infinite width as to be a menace to the rectitude of the neighbourhood; to which Angus was reputed to have replied that Joseph Strorm was a flinty-souled pedant, and bigoted well beyond reason. It was not, therefore, difficult for a row to blow up, and the latest one occurred over Angus’ acquisition of a pair of great-horses.
Rumours of great-horses had reached our district though none had been seen there. My father was already uneasy in his mind at what he had heard of them, nor was the fact that Angus was the importer of them a commendation; consequently, it may have been with some prejudice that he went to inspect them.
His doubts were confirmed at once. The moment he set eyes on the huge creatures standing twenty-six hands at the shoulder, he knew they were wrong. He turned his back on them with disgust, and went straight to the inspector’s house with a demand that they should be destroyed as Offences.
‘You’re out of order this time,’ the inspector told him cheerfully, glad that for once his position was incontestable.’ They’re Government-approved, so they are beyond my jurisdiction, anyway.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ my father told him. ‘God never made horses the size of these. The Government can’t have approved them.’
‘But they have,’ said the inspector. ‘What’s more,’ he added with satisfaction, ‘Angus tells me that knowing the neighbourhood so well he has got attested pedigrees for them.’
‘Any government that could pass creatures like that is corrupt and immoral,’ my father announced.
‘Possibly,’ admitted the inspector, ‘but it’s still the Government.’
My father glared at him.
‘It’s easy to see why some people would approve them,’ he said. ‘One of those brutes could do the work of two, maybe three, ordinary horses — and for less than double the feed of one. There’s a good profit there, a good incentive to get them passed — but that doesn’t mean that they’re right. I say a horse like that is not one of God’s creatures — and if it isn’t His, then it’s an Offence, and should be destroyed as such.’
‘The official approval states that the breed was produced simply by mating for size, in the normal way. And I’d defy you to find any characteristic that’s identifiably wrong with them, anyway,’ the inspector told him.
‘Somebody would say that when he saw how profitable they could be. There’s a word for that kind of thinking,’ my father replied.
The inspector shrugged.
‘It does not follow that they are right,’ my father persisted. ‘A horse that size is not right — you know that unofficially, as well as I do, and there’s no getting away from it. Once we allow things that we know are not right, there’s no telling where it will end. A god-fearing community doesn’t have to deny its faith just because there’s been pressure brought to bear in a government licensing office. There are plenty of us here who know how God intended his creatures to be, even if the Government doesn’t.’
The inspector smiled. ‘As with the Dakers’ cat?’ he suggested.
My father glared at him again. The affair of the Dakers’ cat rankled.
About a year previously it had somehow come to his knowledge that Ben Dakers’ wife housed a tailless cat. He investigated, and when he had collected evidence that it had not simply lost its tail in some way, but had never possessed one, he condemned it, and, in his capacity as a magistrate, ordered the inspector to make out a warrant for its destruction as an Offence. The inspector had done so, with reluctance, whereupon Dakers promptly entered an appeal. Such shilly-shallying in an obvious case outraged my father’s principles, and he personally attended to the demise of the Dakers’ cat while the matter was still sub judice. His position, when a notification subsequently arrived stating that there was a recognized breed of tailless cats with a well-authenticated history, was awkward, and somewhat expensive. It had been with very bad grace that he had chosen to make a public apology rather than resign his magistracy.