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Updated: April 30, 2025
From weakness in his forelegs, he had become a capital buck-jumper, as I think Cathcart called him, always alighting over a hedge on his hind legs, instead of his fore ones, which was as much easier for John Smith as for Hop o' my Thumb that was the name of the old horse, he being sixteen hands, at least.
Hurry up! Take yer partners! They've got Johnny Mears with his fiddle! The Buck-Jumper. Saturday afternoon. Some wiry, ill-used hacks were hanging to the fence and to saplings about the place. The fresh coach-horses stood ready in a stock-yard close to the shanty.
In my young days if a feller couldn't ride a buck-jumper the girls wouldn't look at him, an' yet down here at one of the shows last year in the prize for the hunters, the horses had to be all rode by one man; there wasn't another young feller in the district fit to take a blessed moke over a fence. I felt like goin' out an' tacklin' it meself, I was that disgusted.
For Diana had taken to the life almost as kindly as a young duck takes to the water. She had learned her part quickly, and in a very short time she could ride even the most spirited horse. She was really almost destitute of fear, and was even seen to laugh when she was put upon the back of a buck-jumper, who did his utmost to toss her off.
He jumped at the offer as instinctively as a young swallow would prepare to migrate, seemed to brighten all over, and shake off his dull, defiant mood, and gave no sign of feeling about brother or sister except that he said he believed Felix would get on better without him; and that he told Lance that they would have splendid fun together when he was big enough to come out and ride a buck-jumper.
Even he, though, knew what it was to have serge breeches sticking to abraided bleeding knees, to grip a stripped saddle with twin suppurating sores, and to burrow face-first in filthy tan via the back of a stripped-saddled buck-jumper.
The Oracle had Uncle Bob, of course, and long Dave Regan, the drover a good-hearted, sawny kind of chap that'd break the devil's own buck-jumper, or smash him, or get smashed himself and little Jimmy Nowlett, the bullocky, and one or two of the old, better-class diggers that were left on the field.
All confirmed buck-jumpers look out for this opportunity whenever the rider draws the reins tightly. Ladies who ride with the right leg hooked back would not be able to sit a buck-jumper; for I found that the chief means which prevented me from being thrown was the ability to lean back, which the forward position of my right leg gave me.
The great difficulty in sitting a buck-jumper consists in keeping the body from being jerked forward in the saddle, and slackening the reins the moment the animal makes a vicious downward snatch at them, by ducking his head; for if the rider hangs on to his head, he will pull her forward by means of the reins, and she will be unable to sit the buck which will follow.
Certainly Lady Diana ought to have viewed Dermot's attentions to the sixty-thousand pounder as exemplary, for he engrossed her and me so entirely with the description of Harold's victory over a buck-jumper at Boola Boola, that it was full a quarter of an hour before she looked round to exclaim, "What is become of Viola?"
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