Perhaps an Arabian horse on the desert might outstrip him, but indeed Jocko’s feet seemed hardly to touch the earth as he skimmed along.
Soon he was ahead of the others. Billie looked back over her shoulder and saw Barney making wild gesticulations as the distance between them widened. But Jocko’s mouth was as hard as steel, and when the young girl began presently to draw him in, she made no more impression on him than the wind along the waste.
“Whoa, Jocko,” she cried. “Stop, stop, you little beast.”
On went Jocko, swifter than the wind, swifter than anything Billie had ever imagined. Leaning far over, like a jockey, she pressed her knees into his sides and held to his mane for dear life.
“Perhaps he will tire out,” she thought. “In the meantime, the best I can do is to stick on.”
Only once, did she give an upside-down, backward glance through the crook in her elbow, but her companions were nowhere in sight. Just how long Billie gripped the pony’s neck in this manner and kept her seat, she hardly knew. It might have been five minutes and it might have been thirty. She felt as a shooting star must feel as it flashes through the universe; a secret, blind exhilaration and an immense vacancy of space which seemed to surround her, and withal an overpowering fear.
Then there came a sudden and utterly unexpected halt. At the same moment she unconsciously loosened her grip on the horse’s mane. Head over heels she went, straight over the pony’s head, and lay huddled on the ground, limp and inert.
Jocko sniffed at her an instant and then turned and trotted away. The two little imps in his eyes had retired, and he was once more a mild-mannered demure gray pony.
Imagine yourself the one small human speck in a great vast wilderness of prairie and you can form a vague idea of Billie’s sensations when she opened her eyes.
Trying to collect her scattered senses, she pulled herself together and stood up. Her head swam and she had a shaky sensation in her knees.