"Ride his neck!" Dick shouted. "Catch his foretop and get on his neck till he balances out!" The woman obeyed, digging her toes into the evasive muscle-pads for the quick effort, and leaping upward, one hand twined in the wet mane, the other hand free and up-stretched, darting between the ears and clutching the foretop. The next moment, as the stallion balanced out horizontally in obedience to her shiftage of weight, she had slipped back to the shoulders. Holding with one hand to the mane, she waved a white arm in the air and flashed a smile of acknowledgment to Forrest; and, as Graham noted, she was cool enough to note him on his horse beside Forrest. Also, Graham realized that the turning of her head and the waving of her arm was only partly in bravado, was more in aesthetic wisdom of the picture she composed, and was, most of all, sheer joy of daring and emprise of the blood and the flesh and the life that was she. "Not many women'd tackle that," Dick said quietly, as Mountain Lad, easily retaining his horizontal position once it had been attained, swam to the lower end of the tank and floundered up the rough slope to the anxious cowboy. The latter swiftly adjusted the halter with a turn of chain between the jaws. But Paula, still astride, leaned forward, imperiously took the lead-part from the cowboy, whirled Mountain Lad around to face Forrest, and saluted. "Now you will have to go away," she called. "This is our hen party, and the stag public is not admitted." Dick laughed, saluted acknowledgment, and led the way back through the lilacs to the road. "Who ... who was it?" Graham queried. "Paula--Mrs. Forrest--the boy girl, the child that never grew up, the grittiest puff of rose-dust that was ever woman." "My breath is quite taken away," Graham said. "Do your people do such stunts frequently?" "First time she ever did that," Forrest replied. "That was Mountain Lad. She rode him straight down the spill-way--tobogganed with him, twenty-two hundred and forty pounds of him." "Risked his neck and legs as well as her own," was Graham's comment. "Thirty-five thousand dollars' worth of neck and legs," Dick smiled. "That's what a pool of breeders offered me for him last year after he'd cleaned up the Coast with his get as well as himself. And as for Paula, she could break necks and legs at that price every day in the year until I went broke--only she doesn't. She never has accidents." "I wouldn't have given tuppence for her chance if he'd turned over."