Hinpoha fetched a blanket and strode across the beach, her fair forehead puckered into what she fondly believed to be a ferocious scowl, while the bathers ranged themselves into an audience. Katherine, between clucks and commands, designed to keep Sandhelo’s feet in the straight and narrow path, i.e., the low-jutting ledge of the cliff just above the water line, raised her cracked voice in a three-part harmony and “sang through the fog and wind.” Sandhelo moved forward willingly enough. Since Katherine had taken him seriously in hand that summer he had learned to carry a rider without the accompaniment of music. If he hadn’t, Katherine would never have been able to make him stir, for he certainly would not have classed her husky, bleating tones as music.
Bernal advanced cautiously onto the Paso del Mar, taking care not to slip on the wet stones, and encountered the blithe Pablo midway on the pass, holding tight to his mule’s bridle strap with one hand and covering up a rent in the waist of his bathing suit with the other.
“Back!” shouted Bernal full fiercely.
And “Back!” shouted Pablo in wrath, and then things happened. Sandhelo, with the sensitiveness of his artistic temperament, thought that all remarks made in his presence were intended to be 180 personal. So when Hinpoha looked him in the eye and shouted “Back!” and Katherine jerked his bridle and screamed “Back!” he cannot be blamed if he did what any gentleman would have done when commanded by a lady. He backed.
“Whoa!” shouted Katherine, taken unawares and nearly falling off his small saddle area. But Sandhelo considered that his first orders had been pretty definite and he continued to back along the narrow ledge. “Stop!” screamed Katherine, while the audience roared with laughter, “‘We turn not on Paso del Mar!’”
The word “turn” seemed to give Sandhelo a brilliant new idea, and, without warning, he rose on his hind legs, whirled around in a dizzy semi-circle, and started back in the direction whence he had come. Katherine, unable to check his inglorious flight, hung on grimly. He left the narrow ledge and started climbing the hill, leaving the black-hearted Bernal in full possession of the Paso del Mar. At the top of the hill Katherine slid off Sandhelo’s back, the soft grass breaking her fall, and lay there laughing so she could not get up, while Sandhelo raced on to his favorite grazing ground.
“To think it had to turn out that way, when I was dying to see the part where you fall into the lake,” lamented Migwan, when the cast had collected itself on the beach. “It wasn’t at all the real thing.”
181“Some of it was,” said Sahwah. “The beginning was all right.”
“And the mule did go home ‘riderless’ eventually,” said Katherine, rubbing her bumped elbow. “Didn’t he make speed going around that narrow, slippery ledge, though?” she went on. “I expected him to go overboard every minute. But he tore along as easily as if he were running on a velvetine road.”
“On a what?” asked Slim.