“Good-by, Washoe Ban!” he called out. “Good-by, old fellow.”
The animal was struggling to lift its head. There were tears in Chris’s eyes as he turned abruptly away, and tears in Lute’s eyes as they met his. She was silent in her sympathy, though the pressure of her hand was firm in his as he walked beside her horse down the dusty road.
“It was done deliberately,” Chris burst forth suddenly. “There was no warning. He deliberately flung himself over backward.”
“There was no warning,” Lute concurred. “I was looking. I saw him. He whirled and threw himself at the same time, just as if you had done it yourself, with a tremendous jerk and backward pull on the bit.”
“It was not my hand, I swear it. I was not even thinking of him. He was going up with a fairly loose rein, as a matter of course.”
“I should have seen it, had you done it,” Lute said. “But it was all done before you had a chance to do anything. It was not your hand, not even your unconscious hand.”
“Then it was some invisible hand, reaching out from I don’t know where.”
He looked up whimsically at the sky and smiled at the conceit.
Martin stepped forward to receive Dolly, when they came into the stable end of the grove, but his face expressed no surprise at sight of Chris coming in on foot. Chris lingered behind Lute for moment.
“Can you shoot a horse?” he asked.