Locals Throw Stones at David

The attack on David Henniger during a ride near Tafnet turns a leisure outing into a confrontation that exposes the distance between David’s interpretation of events and Jo Henniger’s doubts. Stones strike David and the horses, the party retreats to the gates, and David responds by condemning the local people rather than reconsidering how his presence and conduct might have appeared to them.

The Ride and Attack

After a long sleep, David joined two French visitors for a ride while Jo was asleep. The group travelled three or four miles along a trail past Tafnet, eventually reaching a stream between high rocks. Near a wooden shack on the rising path, five or six local youths had been waiting behind rocks. David did not see them before a stone struck the ground and startled his horse; as he turned, another stone hit his face. He dismounted and ran toward the shack, but the women called him back. The youths retreated up a slope, and further stones struck the horses as the riders turned away. David sustained a superficial cut, which bled, and the group returned at once while the stone-throwers continued to follow them.

The Return and the Dispute over Responsibility

Back at the chalet, David told Jo that local youths had attacked him during the ride. He insisted they had been waiting behind rocks, though Jo found this account difficult to accept and recalled the angry men she had seen by the gate. Her suggestion that they leave was measured; David instead treated the assault as proof of a broader hostility toward him.

He described the people as irrational and cast their response in terms of primitive retaliation, comparing it to an imagined past in Sicily and to The Godfather. Yet his account also acknowledged that some locals had seen him riding and believed he was enjoying himself. The contrast is telling: Jo considers the scene from the evidence available to her, while David turns an attack by a small group into a judgment on an entire population, leaving his own conduct and the crowd’s possible grievances unexplored.

The Injury Becomes an Accusation

When David returned, Jo first took the blood-marked towel and the small cut on his forehead as signs that he had fallen from his horse. He impatiently rejected that explanation, then identified a stone thrown by a local youth as the cause. The exchange shifts the meaning of his injury: what Jo initially reads as an accident becomes, in David’s account, evidence of deliberate hostility. His wounded face is thus not only the consequence of the ride but the starting point for the broader accusation he makes against the local people.

The Limits of David’s Account

The account also marks what David leaves out when he explains the ride to Jo: he had joined the two French women while she slept, expecting a pleasant diversion, and was in a flirtatious mood with them. That omission does not establish why the youths attacked the riders, but it complicates David’s presentation of himself as an uncomplicated target. His certainty about their motives sits beside Jo’s skepticism and his own recognition that some locals may have read his horseback ride as a display of enjoyment. The episode therefore leaves the cause unresolved while showing how quickly David converts an uncertain encounter into a sweeping judgment of the people around him.