Brag when you’re riding home

“Brag when you’re riding home” is Noddle-Pete’s proverb about postponing triumph until danger is past. Repeated first as a rebuke to Matt’s bluster and later as a dry response to his reports of success, it links a wild beasts’ match to the new robber life and lets the old man’s caution persist even when Matt does not heed it.

Meaning and First Use

Noddle-Pete introduces the saying while Matt strides through the stone hall, grinding his teeth and boasting that he will batter Borka until even Undis would not recognize him. Noddle-Pete sniggers and attributes the maxim to his mother. Its homely, inherited authority cuts across Matt’s violent certainty: the proverb does not deny that he may win, but insists that victory should be claimed only on the ride home.

Ronia, displeased by her father’s talk, says she does not want to watch him battering Borka. Matt answers that she will not be allowed to attend. Women and children are kept away from wild beasts’ matches, as trials of strength are called, because of the violence involved. The saying thus arises in a scene where boastful anticipation is set against a contest whose brutality is acknowledged even in its name.

Repetition After the Match

The proverb returns after the wild beasts’ match in a different setting. Noddle-Pete has aches and shivers and refuses to leave his bed, while Matt visits him every day to describe how the new robber life is going. Matt is pleased: he says Borka is doing a good job, is not too loud-mouthed, and has his wits about him. Together, he reports, they are bringing in one fine haul after another and fooling the sheriff’s men; he looks forward to Matt’s Forest being free of the soldiers.

Noddle-Pete mutters, “Brag when you’re riding home,” but Matt does not listen and has little time to sit with him. The repeated line is pointedly unchanged while the circumstances shift from a threatened fight with Borka to successful joint robberies. Matt’s account offers tangible reasons for satisfaction, yet the proverb keeps its warning intact: a run of good hauls and successful escapes is not the same as a final, secure victory.

Voice and Narrative Function

The saying’s force comes from its recurrence and from the difference between the men’s responses to risk. Matt turns confidently toward the next boast or undertaking; Noddle-Pete answers with a compact rule learned from his mother and repeated without elaboration. His second use makes the proverb more than a joke at Matt’s expense: it becomes a refrain that measures Matt’s confidence against the possibility that fortune may change.

Matt’s failure to heed the warning gives the phrase a quiet irony, but the text does not present Noddle-Pete as predicting a particular reversal. Instead, the proverb frames both scenes with the same practical restraint: do not celebrate until the ride home. Its plain image of delayed boasting holds together the violence of the match, the later partnership between Matt and Borka, and Noddle-Pete’s continued role as a skeptical listener to Matt’s reports.