Michael sank down obediently, but protestingly; and he had eyes only for the horse’s antics, while all his muscles were gathered tensely to spring in case the horse threatened injury to Harley again.
“I can’t give in to him now, or he never will jump anything,” Harley said to his wife, as he whirled about to gallop back to a distance. “Either I lift him over or I take a cropper.”
He came back at full speed, and the colt, despite himself, unable to stop, lifted into the leap that would avoid the stream he feared, so that he cleared it with a good two yards to spare on the other side.
The next time Michael barked was when Harley, on the same hot-blood mount, strove to close a poorly hung gate on the steep pitch of a mountain wood-road. Michael endured the danger to his man-god as long as he could, then flew at the colt’s head in a frenzy of barking.
“Anyway, his barking helped,” Harley conceded, as he managed to close the gate. “Michael must certainly have told the colt that he’d give him what-for if he didn’t behave.”
“At any rate, he’s not tongue-tied,” Villa laughed, “even if he isn’t very loquacious.”
And Michael’s loquacity never went farther. Only on these two occasions, when his master-god seemed to be in peril, was he known to bark. He never barked at the moon, nor at hillside echoes, nor at any prowling thing. A particular echo, to be heard directly from the ranch-house, was an unfailing source of exercise for Jerry’s lungs. At such times that Jerry barked, Michael, with a bored expression, would lie down and wait until the duet was over. Nor did he bark when he attacked strange dogs that strayed upon the ranch.
“He fights like a veteran,” Harley remarked, after witnessing one such encounter. “He’s cold-blooded. There’s no excitement in him.”
“He’s old before his time,” Villa said. “There is no heart of play left in him, and no desire for speech. Just the same I know he loves me, and you—”
“Without having to be voluble about it,” her husband completed for her.