CHAPTER V
The Flying Centaur
The filly grew—skittish and frivolous as her name. Every time the farmer let her out of her stall she bolted past him, and snorting like a steam engine, she flew down the aisle, sending goats and geese scuttling out of her way. Then at the end stall she slowed just long enough to sink her teeth into the buttocks of the black bullock. In the split second before he could kick back, she was out in the sunlight, squeaking a high hello to the world.
"It is a painful thing for the bullock," the farmer told his wife one day. "But if he is not there, the rascal nips me in the pants instead."
The wife burst into a fit of laughter. She threw her apron over her face to stifle her merriment.
"Bah!" the farmer stormed. "Women and fillies, they think alike! For them biting is a funny joke." And he stomped out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.
Away in Monticello, young Giorgio Terni inquired of travelers and tradesmen about the daughter of Sans Souci. He learned only that she was fiery and mischievous, unlike her work-horse mother. But he dreamed often that she had taken the place of his blind mare. In his dreaming she was an Arabian all the way—an Arabian whose ancestors had raced swiftly across the sun-scorched desert. She would be steel-gray, of course, with her muzzle nearly black, and her fine legs black from knees and hocks to hoof, and her eyes enormous and dark. As for size, he thought of her as big enough.