Bankruptcy -- Fiction; Gold mines and mining -- Alaska -- Fiction; Oakland (Calif.) -- Fiction; Western stories; Women pioneers -- Fiction
But, too quickly for her, Bob whirled again, though this time, by a
severe effort, she saved herself from the undignified position against
his neck. His bolt was more determined, but she pulled him into a
prancing walk, and turned him roughly back with her spurred heel.
There was nothing feminine in the way she handled him; her method was
imperative and masculine. Had this not been so, Daylight would have
expected her to say she had had enough. But that little preliminary
exhibition had taught him something of Dede's quality. And if it had
not, a glance at her gray eyes, just perceptibly angry with herself,
and at her firm-set mouth, would have told him the same thing.
Daylight did not suggest anything, while he hung almost gleefully upon
her actions in anticipation of what the fractious Bob was going to get.
And Bob got it, on his next whirl, or attempt, rather, for he was no
more than halfway around when the quirt met him smack on his tender
nose. There and then, in his bewilderment, surprise, and pain, his
fore feet, just skimming above the road, dropped down.
"Great!" Daylight applauded. "A couple more will fix him. He's too
smart not to know when he's beaten."
Again Bob tried. But this time he was barely quarter around when the
doubled quirt on his nose compelled him to drop his fore feet to the
road. Then, with neither rein nor spur, but by the mere threat of the
quirt, she straightened him out.
Dede looked triumphantly at Daylight.
"Let me give him a run?" she asked.
Daylight nodded, and she shot down the road. He watched her out of
sight around the bend, and watched till she came into sight returning.
She certainly could sit her horse, was his thought, and she was a sure
enough hummer. God, she was the wife for a man! Made most of them
look pretty slim. And to think of her hammering all week at a
typewriter. That was no place for her. She should be a man's wife,
taking it easy, with silks and satins and diamonds (his frontier notion
of what befitted a wife beloved), and dogs, and horses, and such
things--"And we'll see, Mr. Burning Daylight, what you and me can do
about it," he murmured to himself! and aloud to her:--
"You'll do, Miss Mason; you'll do. There's nothing too good in
horseflesh you don't deserve, a woman who can ride like that. No; stay
with him, and we'll jog along to the quarry." He chuckled. "Say, he
actually gave just the least mite of a groan that last time you fetched
him. Did you hear it? And did you see the way he dropped his feet to
the road--just like he'd struck a stone wall. And he's got savvee
enough to know from now on that that same stone wall will be always
there ready for him to lam into."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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