United States or Mauritius ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Now the patrol, which had stopped to hail, was coming on again. Banjo's horse was not to be sequestered, nor his craving for companionship in that lonesome night suppressed. He lifted his shrill nicker again, and a shot from the outriders of cavalry was the answer. "Answer them, tell them who you are Banjo they all know you and I'll slip away. Good-bye, and thank you for your brave help!"
Something perhaps it was that consciousness which horses have of the approach of other beings, scent, hearing, or a sense of their own which we can not understand made the chestnut race-horse lift his head and nicker. One of the men rose silently to a sitting posture, and reached for his rifle.
Turned loose with the other horses, he fell to grazing eagerly, actually finding it good, and once lifting a long and shrill nicker in gratitude for this change in his condition. Nor did his delight stop here.
Hunger and weakness, wounds and bruises, had done their work and he could have gone little farther. De Launay raised his head and chafed his blue and frozen hands. The cow-puncher tried to grin. "Glad to see you, old-timer," he croaked. "You're just about in time." "What happened to you, man?" "Don't know. Heard a horse nicker and then mine stumbled and pinned me.
Fallon was driving; Shayne was beating his arms across his chest. And the second team was fagged and caked with frozen lather. Big Louie had been breaking trail for twelve bitterly hard hours, but his animals were still far from spent not so tired in fact but what they could throw forward their heads and nicker at the sight of warm stables.
He trotted down past the stalls to the family horse, and without hesitation stepped in alongside of her. Directly there was a shrill nicker, a lightning flash of heels, and the colt lay sprawling on the stable floor. Never was there a colt more astonished than this one. Dazed, trembling, he regained his feet and looked at the mare, looked hard.
"The deevil's in the women," said poor Hobbie; "they would nicker, and laugh, and giggle, if their best friend was lying a corp and yet I am glad they can keep up their hearts sae weel, poor silly things; but the dirdum fa's on me, to be sure, and no on them." While he thus meditated, he was engaged in fastening up his horse in a shed.
Presently the rattle of a chain was heard nearby, then the outlines of a straw stable were seen, and from the foreground of mist a man appeared unhitching a team of horses from a large farm wagon. Patsie gave a little nicker of anticipation as she scented the sacks of oats, carefully covered, in the back of the wagon.
Outside, fields and hedges and patches of blossom, and poplar trees faintly powdered with green, unrolled, like a scroll before them, behind the nicker of telegraph poles and the festooned wires on which the sun gave glints of red copper. Andrews discovered all at once that the coppery glint on the telegraph wires was the same as the glint in Genevieve's hair.
"My lord," came a voice as out of a fog. Nelson turned. The giant was following them at a panther-prowl. Only the eyes lived; abysms through which the boy gazed down to behold the last nicker of a drowning soul. It was not quite out, that gallant little light. Down there in the tumult of dark waters it fought for life despairingly. Without, the man was black and white and strangely still.
Word Of The Day