Part 30

The mare had raised her head and cocked her ears at the rustling of a quail in the thicket. Chris leaned over and rubbed around her ears. Dolly’s enjoyment was evident, and she drooped her head over against the shoulder of his own horse.

“Like a kitten,” was Lute’s comment.

“Yet I shall never be able wholly to trust her again,” Chris said. “Not after yesterday’s mad freak.”

“I have a feeling myself that you are safer on Ban,” Lute laughed. “It is strange. My trust in Dolly is as implicit as ever. I feel confident so far as I am concerned, but I should never care to see you on her back again. Now with Ban, my faith is still unshaken. Look at that neck! Isn’t he handsome! He’ll be as wise as Dolly when he is as old as she.”

“I feel the same way,” Chris laughed back. “Ban could never possibly betray me.”

They turned their horses out of the stream. Dolly stopped to brush a fly from her knee with her nose, and Ban urged past into the narrow way of the path. The space was too restricted to make him return, save with much trouble, and Chris allowed him to go on. Lute, riding behind, dwelt with her eyes upon her lover’s back, pleasuring in the lines of the bare neck and the sweep out to the muscular shoulders.

Suddenly she reined in her horse. She could do nothing but look, so brief was the duration of the happening. Beneath and above was the almost perpendicular bank. The path itself was barely wide enough for footing. Yet Washoe Ban, whirling and rearing at the same time, toppled for a moment in the air and fell backward off the path.

So unexpected and so quick was it, that the man was involved in the fall. There had been no time for him to throw himself to the path. He was falling ere he knew it, and he did the only thing possible—slipped the stirrups and threw his body into the air, to the side, and at the same time down. It was twelve feet to the rocks below. He maintained an upright position, his head up and his eyes fixed on the horse above him and falling upon him.

Chris struck like a cat, on his feet, on the instant making a leap to the side. The next instant Ban crashed down beside him. The animal struggled little, but sounded the terrible cry that horses sometimes sound when they have received mortal hurt. He had struck almost squarely on his back, and in that position he remained, his head twisted partly under, his hind legs relaxed and motionless, his fore legs futilely striking the air.

Chris looked up reassuringly.

“I am getting used to it,” Lute smiled down to him. “Of course I need not ask if you are hurt. Can I do anything?”

He smiled back and went over to the fallen beast, letting go the girths of the saddle and getting the head straightened out.

“I thought so,” he said, after a cursory examination. “I thought so at the time. Did you hear that sort of crunching snap?”

She shuddered.

“Well, that was the punctuation of life, the final period dropped at the end of Ban’s usefulness.” He started around to come up by the path. “I’ve been astride of Ban for the last time. Let us go home.”

At the top of the bank Chris turned and looked down.

“Good-by, Washoe Ban!” he called out. “Good-by, old fellow.”

The animal was struggling to lift its head. There were tears in Chris’s eyes as he turned abruptly away, and tears in Lute’s eyes as they met his. She was silent in her sympathy, though the pressure of her hand was firm in his as he walked beside her horse down the dusty road.

“It was done deliberately,” Chris burst forth suddenly. “There was no warning. He deliberately flung himself over backward.”

“There was no warning,” Lute concurred. “I was looking. I saw him. He whirled and threw himself at the same time, just as if you had done it yourself, with a tremendous jerk and backward pull on the bit.”

“It was not my hand, I swear it. I was not even thinking of him. He was going up with a fairly loose rein, as a matter of course.”

“I should have seen it, had you done it,” Lute said. “But it was all done before you had a chance to do anything. It was not your hand, not even your unconscious hand.”

“Then it was some invisible hand, reaching out from I don’t know where.”

He looked up whimsically at the sky and smiled at the conceit.

Martin stepped forward to receive Dolly, when they came into the stable end of the grove, but his face expressed no surprise at sight of Chris coming in on foot. Chris lingered behind Lute for moment.

“Can you shoot a horse?” he asked.

The groom nodded, then added, “Yes, sir,” with a second and deeper nod.

“How do you do it?”