There was another great return from Andrew’s
long and steady intimacy with the mare. She came
to accept him absolutely. She knew his voice;
she would come to his whistle; and finally, when every
vestige of unsoundness had left his wounds, he climbed
into that improvised saddle and put his feet in the
stirrups. Sally winced down in her catlike way
and shuddered, but he began to talk to her, and the
familiar voice decided Sally. She merely turned
her head and rubbed his knee with her nose. The
battle was over and won. Ten minutes later Andrew
had cinched a real saddle in place, and she bore the
weight of the leather without a stir. The memory
of that first saddle and the biting of the bur beneath
it had been gradually wiped from her mind, and the
new saddle was connected indisolubly with the voice
and the hand of the man. At the end of that day’s
work Andrew carried the saddle back into the house
with a happy heart.
And the next day he took his first real ride on the
back of the mare. He noted how easily she answered
the play of his wrist, how little her head moved in
and out, so that he seldom had to sift the reins through
his fingers to keep in touch with the bit. He
could start her from a stand into a full gallop with
a touch of his knees, and he could bring her to a
sliding halt with the least pressure on the reins.
He could tell, indeed, that she was one of those rare
possessions, a horse with a wise mouth.
And yet he had small occasion to keep up on the bit
as he rode her. She was no colt which hardly
knew its own paces. She was a stanch five-year-old,
and she had roamed the mountains about Pop’s
place at will. She went like a wild thing over
the broken going. That catlike agility with which
she wound among the rocks, hardly impaired her speed
as she swerved. Andrew found her a book whose
pages he could turn forever and always find something
new.
He forgot where he was going. He only knew that
the wind was clipping his face and that Sally was
eating up the ground, and he came to himself with
a start, after a moment, realizing that his dream had
carried him perilously out of the mouth of the ravine.
He had even allowed the mare to reach a bit of winding
road, rough indeed, but cut by many wheels and making
a white streak across the country. Andrew drew
in his breath anxiously and turned her back for the
canyon.
CHAPTER 28
It was, indeed, a grave moment, yet the chances were
large that even if he met someone on the road he would
not be recognized, for it had been many days since
the death of Andrew Lanning was announced through the
countryside. He gritted his teeth when he thought
that this single burst of childish carelessness might
have imperiled all that he and Jud and Pop had worked
for so long and so earnestly—the time when
he could take the bay mare and start the ride across
the mountains to the comparative safety on the other
side.
