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Then came a lull, and the meadow lark tilted forward expectantly, his head turned sidewise to see what came next. First came Belle Lorrigan, walking backward, a shot-loaded quirt raised admonishingly to the chin of Subrosa who walked stiff-legged and reluctant, his white-lashed, blue eyes rolling fearsomely, his nostrils belling in loud snorts of protest. A complexity of emotions stirred Subrosa.
"It wasn't her tongue that was hurt," Lance observed, and barely saved the buckboard from upsetting on a rock as Rosa and Subrosa shied violently and simultaneously at a rabbit scuttling from a bush before them. He swung the pintos to the right, jounced down into some sort of trail, and let them go loping along at their usual pace.
Much to the disgust of Rosa and Subrosa, their new driver turned them from the main trail just as they were beginning to climb joyously the first grade of Devil's Tooth Ridge. Rosa and Subrosa were subdued, plainly resentful of their subjection, and fretting to be in their own stalls. Belle they could and did bully to a certain extent.
As she sat jouncing on the seat of a buckboard with rattly spokes in all of the four wheels and a splintered dashboard where Subrosa landed his heels one day when he had backed before he kicked, one felt that she would have made a magnificent charioteer. Before she had gone half a mile her hair was down and whipping behind her like a golden pennant.
She stood fairly quiet after that, with little nipping dance-steps in one spot, while Belle fastened buckles and snaps and trace chains. Subrosa, having had his tantrum, contented himself with sundry head-shakings and snorts. When the team was "hooked up" to Belle's satisfaction, she tied them both firmly to the corral with short ropes, and finally turned her attention to her visitors.
But the next moment he looked ahead at the trail, spoke to Rosa who had flung her head around to bite pettishly at Subrosa, who snapped back at her. Mary Hope turned her face to the starlit rangeland. Again she breathed quickly, fought back tears, fought the feeling that she had been kissed.
Afraid to lunge forward, hating to walk circumspectly, eager for the race yet dreading the discipline of rein and whip, Subrosa yielded perforce to the inevitable. As his heels flicked over the low doorsill he swung round and landed one final kick against the log wall, threw up his head in anticipation of the quirt, stepped on a dragging trace chain and jumped as though it was a rattler.
If head-shakings and flattened ears meant anything, Rosa and Subrosa were two disgruntled pintos that morning. They had not dared do more than cut a small half-circle out of the trail when they passed the blackened spot that had been the Whipple shack.
"None of that, you cantankerous brute! One of these days I'm going to just naturally brain you, Sub. I'm getting good and tired of this circus business. You settle down, now, and act human, or " Subrosa kicked at the trace and flipped it up so that it struck him smartly on the rump. He jumped straight forward at Belle, who dodged and landed the quirt none too gently on his nose.
But I'll tell you this: The only things that haven't changed, on the Devil's Tooth, are Riley and the pintos. And even they let you drive 'em to Jumpoff and back last spring without busting things up. They're getting old, I guess. Maybe we're all getting old. Still, Rosa and Subrosa are only ten past, and I haven't had a birthday for years
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