Together they pricked their mares, whirled them about, and fled, while from behind they heard the soothing “Whoas” of the rider, the thuds of the heavy hoofs on the roadway, and a wild imperative neigh. The Outlaw answered, and the Fawn was but a moment behind her. From the commotion they knew Mountain Lad was getting tempestuous.
Leaning to the curve, they swept into a cross-road and in fifty paces pulled up, where they waited till the danger was past.
“He’s never really injured anybody yet,” Paula said, as they started back.
“Except when he casually stepped on Cowley’s toes. You remember he was laid up in bed for a month,” Dick reminded her, straightening out the Outlaw from a sidle and with a flicker of glance catching the strange look with which Paula was regarding him.
There was question in it, he could see, and love in it, and fear—yes, almost fear, or at least apprehension that bordered on dismay; but, most of all, a seeking, a searching, a questioning. Not entirely ungermane to her mood, was his thought, had been that remark of his thinking in statistics.
But he made that he had not seen, whipping out his pad, and, with an interested glance at a culvert they were passing, making a note.
“They missed it,” he said. “It should have been repaired a month ago.”
“What has become of all those Nevada mustangs?” Paula inquired.
This was a flyer Dick had taken, when a bad season for Nevada pasture had caused mustangs to sell for a song with the alternative of starving to death. He had shipped a trainload down and ranged them in his wilder mountain pastures to the west.
“It’s time to break them,” he answered. “And I’m thinking of a real old-fashioned rodeo next week. What do you say? Have a barbecue and all the rest, and invite the country side?”