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There was another but different instance of a horse carrying a corpse at the battle of Lombard's Kop. There was no leering and hideous grinning at us, however, as the rider's head had been blown clean away by a Boer shell. The 5th Lancers were riding out on our right, when a single horse came galloping past them, clattering furiously over the stony veldt.
But he was a stock horse first and a hurdle racer as an afterthought; and a good stock horse knows his rider's mind, if that rider is a good man. He made one tentative movement towards his paddock mates, now moving away towards the gate; then, feeling the touch of Wally's hand on the bit, and the light pressure of his knee, he decided that some new game was on foot, and cantered easily away.
We knew he was drunk, for since Father Le Claire's coming among us he had come to be a sort of gentleman Indian when he was sober; and we caught the naked gleam of the short sharp knife he always wore in a leather sheath at his belt. We were thrown into confusion, and some ponies became unmanageable at once. It is the way of their breed to turn traitor with the least sign of the rider's fear.
Kathleen was curling her back up, and going short, with the most evident intention of balking; but swerving was next to impossible, for she was fairly held in a vice by her rider's hands and knees. The whip fell heavily twice on either shoulder, and, just at the water's edge, Livingstone drove his heels in and lifted her.
The beast he bestrode responded with a rapid whisking of its tail and a great show of effort, as it ambled off down the sandy road, the rider's long legs seeming now and then to touch the ground.
Dorsey, who was standing with Mike Sabota, in a box-seat just below the judges' stand, shouted as he saw the Ramblin' Kid, even in his half-conscious condition, reining the Gold Dust maverick with consummate skill into position, "her rider's drunk!" The Ramblin' Kid heard the voice and by some miracle of the mind recognized it, although his eyes, set and glassy, could not see the speaker.
He idly tapped with his fingers on the sleeve of his khaki shirt, where the arm passed under them to fold over the other. His voice easily matched the rider's in its quality of quietness: "My conversation was private. You are interfering without cause."
But the rider's right arm had fallen limply to her side, and Lenox, looking up, for the first time, into a face deeply shadowed by a wide-brimmed helmet, recognised . . . his wife. Her breath was still coming In small, quick gasps; but there was no shadow of fear in her eyes; no lightest tremor about her close-set lips. "Great God!
We got there in time for dinner; and I put our thumb-prints on the register of the most expensive hotel in the city. He probably meant "sudaderos," which are saddle blankets or pads. The term is also sometimes used to refer to pads that prevent the stirrup straps from rubbing the rider's leg.
He was rolling away from the hills, and his mind had gone back to her seated with folded hands and unseeing eyes in the old circuit rider's porch, dreaming, thinking thinking, dreaming before he began fully to understand.
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