“Well, this day she was everything but a child’s horse,” Chris broke in.  “She was a devil.  She tried to scrape me off against the trees, and to batter my brains out against the limbs.  She tried all the lowest and narrowest places she could find.  You should have seen her squeeze through.  And did you see those bucks?”

Lute nodded.

“Regular bucking-bronco proposition.”

“But what should she know about bucking?” Lute demanded.  “She was never known to buck—­never.”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “Some forgotten instinct, perhaps, long-lapsed and come to life again.”

The girl rose to her feet determinedly.  “I’m going to find out,” she said.

They went back to the horses, where they subjected Dolly to a rigid examination that disclosed nothing.  Hoofs, legs, bit, mouth, body—­everything was as it should be.  The saddle and saddle-cloth were innocent of bur or sticker; the back was smooth and unbroken.  They searched for sign of snake-bite and sting of fly or insect, but found nothing.

“Whatever it was, it was subjective, that much is certain,” Chris said.

“Obsession,” Lute suggested.

They laughed together at the idea, for both were twentieth-century products, healthy-minded and normal, with souls that delighted in the butterfly-chase of ideals but that halted before the brink where superstition begins.

“An evil spirit,” Chris laughed; “but what evil have I done that I should be so punished?”

“You think too much of yourself, sir,” she rejoined.  “It is more likely some evil, I don’t know what, that Dolly has done.  You were a mere accident.  I might have been on her back at the time, or Aunt Mildred, or anybody.”

As she talked, she took hold of the stirrup-strap and started to shorten it.

“What are you doing?” Chris demanded.

“I’m going to ride Dolly in.”

“No, you’re not,” he announced.  “It would be bad discipline.  After what has happened I am simply compelled to ride her in myself.”

But it was a very weak and very sick mare he rode, stumbling and halting, afflicted with nervous jerks and recurring muscular spasms—­the aftermath of the tremendous orgasm through which she had passed.

“I feel like a book of verse and a hammock, after all that has happened,” Lute said, as they rode into camp.

It was a summer camp of city-tired people, pitched in a grove of towering redwoods through whose lofty boughs the sunshine trickled down, broken and subdued to soft light and cool shadow.  Apart from the main camp were the kitchen and the servants’ tents; and midway between was the great dining hall, walled by the living redwood columns, where fresh whispers of air were always to be found, and where no canopy was needed to keep the sun away.

“Poor Dolly, she is really sick,” Lute said that evening, when they had returned from a last look at the mare.  “But you weren’t hurt, Chris, and that’s enough for one small woman to be thankful for.  I thought I knew, but I really did not know till to-day, how much you meant to me.  I could hear only the plunging and struggle in the thicket.  I could not see you, nor know how it went with you.”