United States or Suriname ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There is a story told of a woman who became so sensitive to noise that she had her house made sound-proof: there were thick carpets and softly closing doors; everything was padded. The house was set back from a quiet street, but that street was strewn with tanbark to check the sound of carriages. Surely here was bliss for the sensitive soul.
At the Lochlynne stables they turn on the steam heat in November. On rainy days you are exercised in a glass-roofed tanbark ring, and hour after hour you are handled over deep straw to improve your action. You breathe outdoor air only in high-fenced grass paddocks around which you are driven in surcingle rig by a Cockney groom imported with the pigskin saddles and British condition powders.
It had all passed in twenty seconds by the clock, but to those who watched it seemed a long hour of agony. The moment the leap was made, Anita sprang to her feet and Broussard was on the tanbark. Wild cheering almost drowned the crash of the band; some of the women were weeping and others laughing hysterically, the men cheering like madmen.
"Where have you worked?" "At home, ma'am in the big timber o' Mendocino County haulin' tanbark and ties and shakes and posts over the mountains to the lumber steamers on the coast." "Do you love horses and mules?" she queried eagerly. "I love everything that breathes, I reckon, ma'am," he told her softly. "I kill nothin' that lives, except rattlesnakes, unless I need the meat.
Once, when we were far up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the people had no money at all except that which they received for a few loads of tanbark and with which they paid their taxes, we came to desperate straits. Now, it so happened that year that the women in a rich city church sent out Christmas boxes containing clothing and other necessities.
A tender expression lingered about his strong face as the younger man swung into the circle; a tenderness mingled with approval for the stylish animal that picked up its feet from the odorous tanbark with a precision bespeaking generations of thoroughbred ancestors. The Colonel was a great believer in breeding.
It would be a very disagreeable duty; the poignant memory of Anita lying on the tanbark and Broussard having the skill to save her, still haunted Colonel Fortescue's thoughts and came to him in troubled dreams.
Broussard smilingly picked up Anita's cavalry cap, which had fallen on the tanbark, brushed it and put it on Anita's pretty head; some words, unheard by others, passed between them. The mare then lay perfectly quiet. Broussard, amid the roar of cheers and shouts and furious handclapping and music, got the mare on her feet.
Amid the blare of the band and the riders and chargers almost upon the struggling horse and motionless girl, lying on the tanbark, Broussard, coolly, as if he were on the parade ground, lifted Gamechick by the bridle, gave him a touch of the spur, and the next moment cleared both mare and girl, with twenty inches between Gamechick's iron-shod hind hoofs and Anita's beautiful blonde head.
One instant Anita was in her saddle; the next Pretty Maid stopped, crouched, gave a wild spring, fell prone on her knees, and rolled over, struggling violently. Anita, half thrown and half slipped from her saddle, was on the tanbark, directly in front of Gamechick. She straightened out her slim figure full length, and closed her eyes.
Word Of The Day