She managed to slip one foot from under her, get astride upon the dark, lunging farmhorse—a mountain in the gloom.
“Ha-a! Tha-at’s more like it!” She drew a hissing breath between her teeth.
But if Paddy was drawing comparisons, it was between making hay while the sun shone, greedily pulling down more of it until he was half smothered—and getting rid of the startling burden on his back.
Snorting malignantly, he rocked up against his thrashing stall-mate, Barney, trying to palm that grasshopper burden off on him.
Barney was all reeking excitement, too, in the close, musty quarters.
For a moment, one awful moment, the girl, jammed between their hot, steaming sides, saw herself beneath their mangling hoofs—her life trodden out in the stall.
She was in the lions’ den—and no mistake. For Paddy, great, clodhopping farmhorse, failing to dislodge her thus, swung his dark haunches, lunged with his front shoulder at the dark partition—to crush her there.
But, quick as thought—before his throbbing side could pin her, the girl’s little bare foot, darting forward, was nestling in the hollow of that brutish neck; five tickling, pink toes were stroking it gently—combing it soothingly.
“Treff told me, Treff—Treff,—if ever a horse tries to rub you off, dart your foot forward into the hollow of his neck!” By waves far subtler than radio, she was reaching out now, imploringly to that boy pal with the amber speck of humor in one gray eye—rider of the clouds and rider of the plains.
Across miles of mountain and valley his mantle seemed flung to her, the mantle of his daring, that cock-o’-pluck—so that, with her right leg stretched out, level, across the cross brute’s shoulder and five little toes seductively curry-combing, she was patting the other side of the swollen neck, with a: