The young smith’s face flushed angrily.
“All right!” he retorted, “leave her where she is. There isn’t any horse or anything else belonging to you or connected with you,––and including you––that I can’t put shoes on.”
Phil went over to look more closely at the animal, as the Mayor went to her head and stroked her nose.
“Sure you’re not scared? She’s a heller!”
Phil walked round her without answering. He was at her rear, closer than he should have been, when Brenchfield suddenly reached and whispered a peculiar, grating, German-like, guttural sound in the mare’s ear.
Like lightning her ears went back, her eyes spurted fire, a thrill ran through her body and her two hind feet shot into the air. Brenchfield shouted warningly.
Phil, only half alert, sprang aside. The iron-ringed hoofs flashed past him, one biting along his cheek and ripping it an eighth of an inch deep. Phil staggered to the wall, as the horse continued to plunge and rear in a paroxysm of madness. Her owner tried to pacify her, but he made little headway with the job.
“Good Lord, man! as a man working among horses don’t you know better than to hang around the flanks of one of her kind like that? If she had hit you, it would have been all day with you.”
Phil pulled himself together.