An old game that she had played at the Cuckoos' Nest sent a verse floating idly through her memory:
"How many miles to Barley-bright?"
"Three score and ten!"
"Can I get there by candle light?"
"Yes, if your legs are long and light—
There and back again!
Look out! The witches will catch you!"
With somewhat of the same eerie feeling that had affected her when she joined in the game with Betty and the little Appletons, she turned the pony into the narrow trail that led across the sand in and out among the sage-brush. Later, those same gray bushes might look startlingly like witches reaching up out of the gloaming.
"It's a good thing that yoah legs are long and light," she said to the pony, as he started off with a long, rabbit-like lope. "And it's a good thing that you seem as much at home heah as Br'er Rabbit was in the brush-pile when Br'er Fox threw him in for stealing his buttah. I'm glad it isn't old Tar Baby that I'm on. He wouldn't be used to these gophah holes, and would stumble into the first one we came to. Oh, this is glorious!"
She shook back her hair as the soft, orange-perfumed breeze blew it about her face. Her full white sleeves fluttered out from her arms. Again she had that delightful sense of birdlike motion, of free, wild swinging through space. On and on they went, never noticing how far they had travelled or how dark it was growing, till suddenly she saw that she was not on any trail. A thick growth of stubby mesquit bushes made almost a thicket in front of her. An enormous cactus, thirty feet high, stood in her way like one of the Barley-bright witches. From its thorny trunk stretched two great arms, thrown up as if to ward off her coming. Its resemblance to a human figure was uncanny, and she stood staring at it with a fascinated gaze.
"It's big enough to be the camel-drivah of the camel in the mountain," she said in a half-whisper to the pony. Then looking on toward the mountain, she realized that she had to strain her eyes to see it through the rapidly gathering gloom. Night had fallen suddenly, and the mountain seemed farther away than when she started.
"Oh, it will be black night befoah we get home," she thought, turning in nervous haste. Then a new trouble confronted her. She was facing a dim, trackless wilderness, and she did not know how to get home. She had kept the mountain steadily in view as she rode toward it, but now she realized that it was so large that she could easily do that, and still at the same time go far out of her course.
"You'll have to find the way home," she said, helplessly, to the pony, failing to remember that the Wigwam pasture had been his home for only a few weeks, and that, left to himself, he would go directly to his native ranch.
