By the time Lorraine had bullied and cajoled him into making a somewhat
circuitous route to the road, where he finally appeared some distance
above the point of his descent, Brit was there, hitching the team to
the wagon.
"What yuh doing up there?" he wanted to know, looking up with some
astonishment.
Lorraine furnished him with details and her opinion of both Caroline
and Yellowjacket. "I simply refuse to ride this comedy animal another
mile," she declared with some heat. "I'll drive the team and you can
ride him home, or he can be tied on behind the wagon."
"He won't lead," Brit objected. "Yeller's all right if you make up
your mind to a few failin's. You go ahead and ride him home. You sure
can't drive this team."
"I can!" Lorraine contended. "I've driven four horses--I guess I can
drive two, all right."
"Well, you ain't going to," Brit stated with a flat finality that
abruptly ended the argument.
Lorraine had never before been really angry with her father. She
struck Yellowjacket with her quirt and sent him sidling past the wagon
and the tricky Caroline, too stubborn to answer her dad when he called
after her that she had better ride behind the load. She went on,
making Yellowjacket trot when he did not want to trot down hill.
Behind her she heard the chuck-chuck of the loaded wagon. Far ahead
she heard some one whistling a high, sweet melody which had the queer,
minor strains of some old folk song. For just a few bars she heard it,
and then it was stilled, and the road dipping steeply before her seemed
very lonely, its emptiness cooling her brief anger to a depression that
had held her too often in its grip since that terrible night of the
storm. For the first time she looked back at her father lurching along
on the load and at the team looking so funny with the collars pushed up
on their necks with the weight of the load behind.
With a quick impulse of penitence she waved her hand to Brit, who waved
back at her. Then she went on, feeling a bit less alone in the world.
After all, he was her dad, and his life had been hard. If he failed to
understand her and her mental hunger for real companionship, perhaps
she also failed to understand him.
They had left the timber line now and had come to the lip of the canyon
itself. Lorraine looked down its steep, rock-roughened sides and
thought how her old director would have raved over its possibilities in
the way of "stunts." Yellowjacket, she noticed, kept circumspectly to
the centre of the trail and eyed the canyon with frank disfavour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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