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And I'm game for the other half " He stopped abruptly, cast one look at Sunfish and another at Boise, stepping about uneasily, his shiny coat rippling, beautiful. He turned and combed Sunfish's scanty mane with his gloved fingers. Those nearest saw that his lips were trembling a little and mistook his hidden emotion for anger. "You got him going," a man whispered in Jeff's ear.
She led him into another small gorge whose extent he could not see, and stopped him with a hand pressed against Sunfish's shoulder. "We'd better get down and hold our horses quiet," she cautioned. "Boise may try to whinny, and he mustn't." They stood side by side at their horses' heads, holding the animals close.
The crowd surged closer, gave Sunfish a glance and whooped again. Bud's face was red with apparent anger, his eyes snapped. He faced them defiantly, his hand on Sunfish's thin, straggling mane. "You're such good sports, you'll surely appreciate my feelings when I say that this horse is mine, and I'm going to run him and back him to win!" he cried. "I may be a darn fool, but I'm no piker.
Eddie glanced back over his bobbing shoulder as his horse trotted along the blind trail through the brush. "This here ain't no race track," he expostulated. "We'll make it quicker without no broken legs." There was justice in his protest and Bud said nothing. But Sunfish's head bumped the tail of Eddie's horse many times during that ride.
Lying forward flattened along Sunfish's hard-muscled shoulders, Bud was gaining and gaining one length, then two lengths as he shot under the wire, slowed and rode back to find a silent crowd watching him.
The youth's eyes became fixed upon the guitar and mandolin cases roped on top of Sunfish's pack, and he pointed and gobbled something which had the sound speech without being intelligible. Bud cocked an ear toward him inquiringly, made nothing of the jumble and rode off to the cabin, leading Sunfish after him.
They followed a twisting trail along the canyon's wall, rode into another pit of darkness, came out into a sandy stretch that seemed hazily familiar to Bud. They crossed this, dove into the bushes following a dim trail, and in ten minutes Eddie's horse backed suddenly against Sunfish's nose.
Bud stood in the stirrups and looked back. They were still coming, for he could hear the pound of hoofs. The ranch was behind him. Clear starlight was all around, and the bulk of near mountains. The road seemed sandy, yielding beneath the pound of Sunfish's hoofs.
We found a little basin among the rushes at the south end of the lake, about waist-deep and a rod or two wide, shaped like a sunfish's nest. Here we kicked and plashed for many a lesson, faithfully trying to imitate frogs; but the smooth, comfortable sliding gait of our amphibious teachers seemed hopelessly hard to learn.
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