“Did he—did he try him?” Beatrice wished to know.
Her feelings in the matter were oddly mixed, for she dreaded the moment when she must actually mount to the big, unfamiliar saddle, and yet she was all on fire to try the horse’s speed.
“No, he didn’t try him,” was the answer. “He just said he wanted a safe horse for his daughter, liked the looks of this one—and well he might,—and took my word for it that the horse would suit and would go like greased lightning, besides. There, now, the saddle’s firm. You mustn’t think anything of the way he acts when you pull up the cinch; they all do that!”
For all her misgivings, Beatrice was no coward. She stepped forward, discovered in one violent second that a Western pony sets off the moment he feels the rider’s weight on the stirrup, then flung herself, somehow, into the saddle and was away.
“I did not do that very well,” she was thinking. “Another time—oh, oh!”
For her very thought was interrupted by the sudden rush of wordless delight as the horse beneath her stretched himself to that long easy lope that is like nothing else in the world. The fresh mountain wind, sweeping down from the clean, high peaks above, sang in her ears; the stony road swung past below; the motion was as easy as a rocking-chair but seemed as swift as thought itself. Motoring she had always loved, but she confessed with sudden disloyalty that it was bumpy business compared to the measured swaying of this living creature between her knees. Buck’s personal prejudices seemed, indeed, to be directed solely against the cinching of the saddle. That process once over he was as eager and happy as she to clatter across the bridge, pass the last of the ugly little houses and the high-fronted store buildings, and turn his white-blazed face toward the mounting trail that led out of the valley.
Beatrice drew rein when they had breasted the first rise, and paused a moment to look back. The houses strewn haphazard across the slope below her made more of a town than she had thought. There was the packing-box railroad station where she and her sister, Nancy, and their Aunt Anna had arrived so recently; there was the house where they were living, a little larger than the others, but square, hideous, and unshaded like the rest.
“We mustn’t care for architecture,” Nancy had said when they first surveyed their dwelling rather ruefully, “when the Rocky Mountains begin in our back yard.”
There was also the winding stream with its abrupt bend that warranted the title of Broken Bow Creek, a mere trickle of water just now, in that wide, dry valley down which the thin line of the railroad stretched away, with the straight parallel of the rails seeming to bend and quiver in the hot clearness of the sunshine. South of the town was a portion of Ely that she had not seen before, a group of warehouses, some office buildings, and a huddle of workmen’s bunk-houses. She could see the cobweb lines of temporary railroad, a steam-shovel moving on a flat-car, and innumerable men toiling like black ants along the sides of the raw cut that had been made in the red soil of the valley.
“That must be the irrigation ditch that Dan O’Leary was telling us about,” she reflected. “How hot it looks down there! I did not dream they had so many men. And how clear the air is! Oh, surely, surely, Aunt Anna will get well here as fast as we hope!”