She had all she could do to hold on now, yet she screamed, "Go it! Go it!—We've overhauled blue and white, but red and green is three lengths ahead. Beat him, Pony, beat him!" and she thumped me well.
"There now!" she exclaimed presently, "the sound of his hoofs is getting fainter and fainter. He's fallen behind—we're it—we're it."
I had not been exercised for some days, and the road did feel good to my hoofs, while the keen sharp air seemed to cut open to let us through and to bathe us with wood scents as we passed.
There was the pungent odor of burning logs in the settlers' cottages that seemed to dance by us and the lovely scent of flowers and young leaves in the woodland patches between the houses. The air was like velvet to my nostrils. How different from the irritating city dust that made me sneeze and cough.
I stretched out my neck, and as for my tail it floated out so straight behind that I didn't seem to have any. My every stride was a little longer, a little faster.
By and by we passed the last of the settlers' houses and the summer cottages, and now there were only the flying trees on one side and the cool gloom and pallor of the lake on the other.
Suddenly we came into shadow and partial darkness. We were rounding the head of the lake and high above us towered forbidding steep rock cliffs shorn of all greenness by a bush fire that had passed over and left them desolate.
I flashed by them like a streak of lightning, but just beyond them when we got into the neighbourhood of some gaunt pines fire-scorched but not burnt, my clatter over the bare hard road suddenly ceased. My rider had pulled me up.
"Bang!" she yelled, "over the line, over the line, first money for us," and flinging herself off my back, she threw her arms about my neck.