Local Youths Attack David

The attack on David Henniger interrupts a horseback ride near Tafnet and turns an attempted diversion into a confrontation. Recounted afterward to Jo Henniger, the incident also exposes how quickly David interprets the assault through assumptions about the local people, while Jo questions his account of what happened.

Causes and Background

After a long sleep, David felt recovered and joined two French women who were going riding; Jo had been asleep. The ride offered what David regarded as a break from the difficulties and distress of their stay. The group traveled three or four miles along a trail past Tafnet, riding in single file toward a stream between high rocks. As the path climbed toward another peak, a wooden shack stood beside it. David did not see the boys who had concealed themselves there, and the riders could not have known in advance that anyone was waiting.

The Attack and Return

As the path rose toward another peak, stones came from a wooden shack. One startled David’s horse; another struck his face. He dismounted and ran toward the shack, but the two women called him back. Five or six local boys retreated up the slope, taunting the riders, while more stones were thrown at the group and the horses. David and the women turned back at once; the boys continued following them and throwing stones. The incident left David with a cut on his forehead, which was still bleeding when he later recounted what had happened to Jo.

Jo questioned the account rather than accepting David’s claim that the attack showed the character of the local people. She found it difficult to believe that the boys had lain in wait, though she remembered the angry men gathered by the gate. David, by contrast, treated the attack as confirmation of his broad judgments about the people around him and speculated that they held him responsible. The mismatch between Jo’s doubts and David’s certainty makes the telling of the assault another point of conflict between them, not simply a report of what happened on the trail.

The Crowd and David’s Interpretation

When the riders returned to the gates, David reported that a crowd of local people had gathered. He took their presence as evidence that news of the attack had spread and assumed they believed he was responsible because he had gone riding. The scene does not confirm what the crowd thought; that explanation belongs to David’s account, which turns an uncertain public reaction into a judgment about him.

He also cast the assault as proof of a wider cultural disposition, comparing the people around him to a stereotyped image of primitive retaliation. That leap from an ambush by a handful of boys to a verdict on an entire population reveals how readily David’s fear and resentment become generalizations. The attack therefore has a double consequence: it brings the riders back under the gaze of a crowd, and it sharpens the prejudiced framework through which David interprets both the violence and its aftermath.

What David Leaves Unsaid

David’s account to Jo leaves out a detail that complicates its presentation of the ride: he had joined the two French women in a flirtatious mood. They had spent time in London and spoke English well, making conversation easy as the riders followed the trail. The omission does not change the sequence of the attack, but it places David’s aggrieved retelling alongside a less self-exculpatory context. His version emphasizes the boys’ violence and the crowd’s presumed judgment; the fuller scene also shows that the ride had offered him a diversion he welcomed for reasons he did not share with his wife.