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Updated: June 12, 2025
It was moonlight on the battlements. The horses champed in the courtyard below. They two had climbed to the topmost turret, that they might part as near the stars as possible, and that, unseen by others, she might watch him ride away. How radiant she looked, in her robe of sapphire velvet, jewels at her breast and girdle, a mantle of ermine hanging from her shoulders.
There was a brief silence, in which all eyes were turned again upon the golden horse, standing motionless but alert, as if keenly alive to all that passed. The common ponies around him stamped, and champed their bits, and moved restlessly in their places, but Sunnysides remained calm and observant, with all the dignity and contempt of a captive patrician in a crowd of yokels.
He tossed his head, champed his bit, and pranced sideways along the streets of Flagstaff, manifestly to show off his brand new black Mexican saddle, with silver trappings and tapaderos. I was sure that he did not do that to show me off. But Don liked to dance and prance along before a crowd, a habit that he had acquired with the motion pictures.
Fate had dealt him a cruel blow, and he felt as he would have done had he, impotent, seen one steal the great charger that champed and pawed there at the door, and replace it by a potter's donkey. Nay, worse for he had loved Lenore, his wife, and Fate had stolen her away and replaced her by a squealing brat.
They champed their bits and moved about restlessly as though impatient to be off. Their riders, however, had them under good control, and now the judges tossed the coin for choice of position on the track. Zibe Turner secured the inside place, George LeMonde came next, and Hiram Ketcham, Farmer Ketcham's son of eighteen, was on the outer rim of the circle, next to the fence.
It had a wall all round it, even on the side where the river ran, and inside the wall were courts and gardens with fountains and roses in them, divided by other walls, and pillared verandahs, where little green lizards ran about in the sun, and a great many stables, where the Maharajah's horses pawed and champed to be let out and ridden.
As it grew nearer and nearer, it grew grayer, a changing mass of white and black that fused, in the obscurity, into a shadow color; a dense array of men and horses flitting noiselessly like spirits, and as though guided alone by one rein and moved alone by one breath and one will; not a bit champed, not a linen-fold loosened, not a shiver of steel was heard; as silently as the winds of the desert sweep up northward over the plains, so they rode now, host upon host of the warriors of the soil.
"She has had a fall, but isn't hurt or frightened," thought the boy, as the pretty creature rubbed her nose against his shoulder, pawed the ground and champed her bit, as if she tried to tell him all about the disaster, whatever it was. "Lita, where's Miss Celia?" he asked, looking straight into the intelligent eyes, which were troubled but not wild.
He would have given almost anything to be a Spaniard, and he lived in a dream of some day sallying out upon the Vega before Granada, in silk and steel, with an Arabian charger under him that champed its bit.
Nor did they notice his occasional exclamations and utterances of phrases which meant nothing to them, as, for instance, when he smacked his lips and champed his gums while muttering: "Mayonnaise! Just think mayonnaise! And it's sixty years since the last was ever made! Two generations and never a smell of it! Why, in those days it was served in every restaurant with crab."
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