"No, I never did," shuddered the lady; "and I'm not sure that I'd want to," she finished decisively, as she turned away.
The new horse proved to be a fiery little bay mustang, and the fight began from the first moment that the noose settled about his untamed little neck. As Tilly told of the affair in the Chronicles of the Hexagon Club, it was like this:
"We saw a broncho busted this afternoon. Reddy busted it, and he was splendid. Mercy! I shall never think anything my old Beauty does is bad again. Beauty is a snail and a saint beside this jumping, plunging, squealing creature that never by any chance was on his feet properly—except when he came down hard on all four of them at once with his back humped right up in the middle in a perfectly frightful fashion—and I suppose that wasn't 'properly.' Anyhow, I shouldn't have thought it was, if I had had to try to sit on that hump!
"But that wasn't the only thing that he did. Dear me, no! He danced, and rolled, and seesawed up and down—'pitching,' Mr. Hartley called it. And I'm sure it looked like it. First he'd try standing on his two fore feet, then he'd give them a rest, and take the other two. And sometimes he couldn't seem to make up his mind which he wanted to use, or which way he wanted to turn, and he'd change about right up in the air so he'd come down facing the other way. My, he was the most uncertain creature!
"It didn't seem to make a mite of difference where the horse was, or what he did with his feet, though. Reddy was right there every time, and all ready, too. (Yes, I know a pun is the lowest order of wit. But I don't care. I couldn't help it, anyway—it was such a ready one!) There he sat, so loose and easy, too, with his quirt (that's a whip), and it looked sometimes just as if he wasn't half trying—that he didn't need to. But I'm sure he was trying. Anyhow, I know I couldn't have stayed on that horse five minutes; and I don't believe even Genevieve could. (I said that to Mr. Tim Nolan, and he laughed so hard I thought I'd put it in here, and let somebody else laugh.)
"Of course every one of us was awfully excited, and the boys kept shouting and cheering, and yelling 'Stay with him!' and telling him not to 'go to leather'—whatever that may mean! And Reddy did stay. He stayed till the little horse got tired out; then he got off, and led the horse away, and some of the other boys went through a good deal the same sort of thing with other horses, only these had all been partly broken before, they told us. But, mercy, they were bad enough, anyhow, I thought, to have been brand-new. Reddy did another one, too, and this time he put silver half-dollars under his feet in the stirrups: And when the little beast—the horse, I mean, not Reddy—got through his antics, there the half-dollars were, still there in the same old place. How the boys did yell and cheer then!
"After that, they all just 'showed off' for us, throwing their ropes over anything and everything, and playing like a crowd of little boys on a picnic, only Mr. Hartley said they were doing some 'mighty fine roping' with it all. Their ropes are mostly about forty feet long, and it looked as if they just slung them any old way; but I know they don't, for afterward, just before we went in to supper, Reddy let me take his rope, and I tried to throw it. I aimed for a post a little way ahead of me, but I got Pedro, the Mexican cowboy, behind me, right 'in the neck,' as Mr. Tim said. Pedro grinned, and of course everybody else laughed horribly.
"And thus endeth the account of how the bronchos were busted. (P.S. I hope whoever reads the above will own up that for once Tilly Mack got some sense into her part. So there!) I forgot to say we took a nap after dinner. Everybody does here. 'Siestas' they call them, Genevieve says."
It was after supper that Genevieve said: