The other farmers were waiting on their horses, so serious and quiet: in their patience and unobtrusiveness, so gentlemanly, Jack thought. So unlike the assertive, jeering Easu.
Lennie came up and whipped the pin out of Jack's favour. It was a rosette of yellow ribbon, shiny as a buttercup, that Monica had made him.
"Here, what're you doing!" he cried.
"Aw, shut it. Keep still!" said Lennie.
And slipping round, he pushed the pin, point downward, into the back saddle-pad of the chestnut Jack was holding. That wasn't fair. But Jack let be.
The judge called his warning, the Cornseeds lined up, along with Joe Low and a young yellow-faced dairyman and a slender skin-hunter, and a woolly old stockman. Easu came and took his chafing horse, but did not mount.
"One!" Easu swung up, standing in his stirrups, scarce touching the saddle-seat.
"Two! Three!" and the sharp crack of a pistol.
Away went the scraggy brumby and Joe, and like a torrent, the dairyman and the skin-hunter and the stockman. But the chestnut had never heard a pistol shot before, and was jumping round wildly.
"Blood and pace, mark you;" said the judge, waving towards the chestnut. "Them cockeys does their best on what they got, but watch that chestnut under Red Ellis. It's a pleasure to see good horse-flesh like them Ellises brings up to these parts."