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Clattering up the roadway came the sound of a hard-ridden horse's hoofs, then his labored breathing, and a soft voice steadying him to further effort. Into the shadows was injected something moving, some unfamiliar, living shape. It turned up the hill over the trail, and plunged wearily toward them. They jumped to their feet and stepped down off the porch, advancing to meet the belated visitor.
Ah, when you wonder, look above you; look above you in the night, I say," he cried, his hand upraised like his transfigured face. "Look above you and you will never fear that a sparrow's fall could go unmarked!" It was not to the stars that she looked, but to the orator, as long as he held that pose, which lasted until a hard-ridden horse came galloping down the street.
They denied us harshly, and wanted to know who of us had sold them food when we drove them from Missouri. It was useless on our part to tell them we were from Arkansas. From Arkansas we truly were, but they insisted on our being Missourians. At Beaver, five days' journey south from Fillmore, we saw Lee again. And again we saw hard-ridden horses tethered before the houses.
Worn with the emotional conflict through which he had passed, and the sleepless night preceding the hard-ridden hours, his day-dream faded into deep slumber and the shadows were slanting across the road when he awoke with a sudden start.
There was a wave of the arm to Riley, and he responded by bringing his horse to a trot, then reining in close to the big man. At close hand he seemed even larger than from a distance, a burly figure with ludicrously inadequate support from the narrow-heeled riding boots. He looked sharply at Riley Sinclair, but his first speech was for the hard-ridden pony.
Beneath the belly of the lady's horse stood her hound, his tongue lolling and his coat a cake of mire. The night had been chilly and the nostrils of the hard-ridden beasts made a steam among the lights we held, while above us the upper frontage of the house stood out clear between the growing daylight and the waning moon poised above the courtlege-wall in the south-west. "Hey! Is that Paschal?"
Yet Harry Simms, the supreme adventurer of his age, was not without distinction; his lithe form and his hard-ridden horse were the common dread of England; his activity was rewarded with a princely treasure; and if his method were lacking in urbanity, the excuse is that he danced not to the brilliant measure of the Cavaliers, but limped to the clumsy fiddle-scraping of the early Georges.
And then, far-distant yet not above, but under the jolting of the gun-wheels and the rattle of the scabbards they could hear the clickety-clickety-clickety-click of a horse hard-ridden. They had scarcely caught that sound, they had barely tightened up their bridle-reins, when another sound, one just as unmistakable, burst out in front of them.
"Keep an eye lifting, you men," ordered Brown. "This'll be a messenger from Bholat, ten to one. Mind they don't ambush him! Watch every way at once, and shoot at anything that moves!" "Clippety-clippety-clippety-cloppety " The sound of a galloping horse grew nearer; a horse hard-ridden, that was none the less sure-footed still, and going strong in spite of sun and heat.
Soon staccato, like a drum-beat in the silence came the welcome, thrilling cadence of the horse's hoofs the steady thunder of a horse hard-ridden but not foundered. The sun went down and blackness supervened, but the sound increased, as one lone rider raced with the evening wind, head on.
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