“Oh, you’ll have to thank Audrey for the show! Mesquite is doing it solely for her sake. He has been her abject slave ever since she came.”
Both men laughed and looked at Miss Glendower, who did not even smile. It might have been that she did not hear them. They rose and went out to the shaded piazza where it was cooler. The heat was making Miss Glendower look pale.
They, and the ranch hands who saw “Sobrepaso” (“the beautiful red devil,” Mrs. Madison called him) brought out into the gray, hard beaten square that formed the arena, felt a thrill of nervous expectancy—a chilling thrill—as Mesquite made ready to mount. The horse was blindfolded ere the saddle was thrown on; but with all the fury of a fiend he fought—in turn—blanket, and saddle, and cincha. The jaquima was slipped on, the stirrups tied together under the horse’s belly, and all the while his squeals of rage and maddened snorts were those of an untamed beast that would battle to the death. The blind then was pulled up from his eyes, and—at the end of a sixty-foot riata—he was freed to go bucking and plunging in a fury of uncontrolled wrath around the enclosure. At last sweating and with every nerve twitching in his mad hatred of the meddling of Man he was brought to a standstill, and the blind was slipped down once more. He stood with all four feet braced stiffly, awkwardly apart, and his head down, while Mesquite hitched the cartridge belt (from which hung his pistol’s holster) in place; tightened the wide-brimmed, battered hat on his head; slipped the strap of a quirt on his wrist; looked at the fastenings of his big-rowelled, jingling spurs; and then (with a quick, upward glance at Miss Glendower—the first he had given her) he touched caressingly a little bunch of white primroses he had plucked that morning from their bed in the sand hills and pinned to the lapel of his unbuttoned vest.
Mesquite had gathered the reins into his left hand, and was ready for his cat-like spring into place. His left foot was thrust into the stirrup—there was the sweep of a long leg thrown across the saddle—a sinuous swing into place, and Mesquite—“the star rider of the range” had mounted the man killer. Quickly the blind was whipped up from the blood-shot eyes, the spurred heels gripped onto the cincha, there was a shout from his rider and a devilish sound from the mustang as he made his first upward leap, and then went madly fighting his way around and around the enclosure.
Mesquite sat the infuriated animal as though he himself were but a part of the sorrel whirlwind. His seat was superb. Miss Glendower felt a tremor of pride stir her as she watched him—pride that her lover should witness this matchless horsemanship. She was panting between fear and delight while she watched the boy’s face (wearing the sweet, boyish smile—like, yet so unlike—the smile she had come to know in the past weeks), and the yellow curls blowing back from the bared forehead.
“Sobrepaso” rose in his leaps to great heights—almost falling backward—to plunge forward, with squeals of rage that he could not unseat his rider. The boy sat there, a king—king of his own little world, while he slapped at the sorrel’s head and withers with the sombrero that swung in his hand. Plunging and leaping, round and round—now here and now there—about the enclosure they went, the horse a mad hurricane and his rider a centaur. Mesquite was swayed back and forth, to and fro, but no surge could unseat him. Miss Glendower grew warm in her joy of him as she looked.
Then, somehow (as the “man killer” made another great upward leap) the pistol swinging from Mesquite’s belt was thrown from its holster, and—striking the cantle of the saddle as it fell—there was a sharp report, and a cloud-like puff (not from the dust raised by beating hoofs), and a sound (not the terrible sounds made by a maddened horse), and the boy swayed backward—backward—with the boyish smile chilled on his lips, and the wet, yellow curls blowing back from his white forehead that soon would grow yet whiter.
Miss Glendower did not faint, neither did she scream; she was one with her emotions held always well in hand, and she expressed the proper amount of regret the occasion required—shuddering a little over its horror. But to this day (and she is Mrs. Lawrence Irving now) she cannot look quite steadily at a big, red star that sometimes burns in the West at early eve; and the scent of tuberoses, or jasmine, or syringa makes her deathly sick.