The boy and his horse seemed to have been caught up to the skies or to have sunk into the solid earth!
CHAPTER XXVII
A STERN CHASE
FOR a brief instant Dad sat blinking, incredulous. Then he saw and understood.
Crossing the field to right of the road and at an acute angle to it, a full quarter of a mile ahead, thundered a runaway horse. And on the horse’s back, clutching frantically to the saddle, his new-learned principles of riding quite forgotten, swayed and clung Battle Jimmie.
At flash of steel against steel the boy’s half-trained cavalry horse had shied violently. The flying bayonet’s point in passing had pricked his shoulder top, narrowly missing Jimmie.
With a wild bound of fear and pain the horse had cleared the roadside ditch and had struck off at a bounding gallop across the field.
Jimmie, almost unseated by that first leap, grabbed the pommel with one hand, while with the other he sawed at the reins.
He might as readily have pulled against an artillery tug-of-war team. The horse merely lunged his long neck forward a little, caught the bit between his teeth, and sped on, frantic with fear.
With high-pitched voice, and futile, brave little hand the boy sought in vain to check or guide the mad, pounding flight. The horse, which the regimental farrier had that morning vouched for to Dad as “a little rough yet, but as gentle as a kitten,” was an old and incurable offender in the vice of running away.
As a matter of fact it was for this grievous fault that his civilian master had recently sold him cheap to a cavalry contractor.