Cannie Nanny, in the midst, became a center of gravity.
An hour later, when a riding party swung down the mountain, it was with a gay switching of crops, a new esprit de corps, the sense of a leap taken to keep abreast of bold boy amateurs—a leap in grace and growing.
CHAPTER XIII
The Long Pasture
“Here, Rev. Here, Good Boy! Oats—smell ’em!”
Pemrose, wild with the welcome of the mountains and the triumph of that late long-distance talk with her father—to say nothing of a step, at any rate, towards a secret code for Camp Fire Girls—was dancing all over the Long Pasture.
Temptingly in her hand was the flat tin, half full of oats, which she had taken from a bin in the gray shed at a western corner of the mile-long pasture. An outpost of the farm buildings, paddocks and horse-boxes, more than a mile below, was that weather beaten shed; in it tools were kept and farm implements used in the grain raising for horses, the bean and corn growing, upon the lower sidehill, the outskirts of the well-stocked horse-farm in the rich, green bottom-lands!
“Oats! Oats! Smell them—Boy! Maybe there’s a lump of sugar somewhere, too! Two lumps—if you’re very good!”
She patted the breast pocket of her linen riding habit, holding the pan of grain aslant.
Revelation approached warily, step by step, his beautiful bay neck outstretched, his long face eager—dark eyelids blinking.
Within a dozen feet of the temptress he halted, suspicious of the hand behind her back, pushed his nose out, the neck quite level, his breath coming in a white, investigating cloud.