"And we'll have the boys pick out some horses for you, too," cried Genevieve, smoothing Pepito's sleek8 coat in response to his welcoming whinny of delight. "I'm sure they can find something all right for us."
Tilly's eyes brightened, so, too, did Bertha's; but Cordelia spoke9 hastily, her eyes bent10 a bit distrustfully on the spirited little horse Genevieve was petting.
"Oh, but I don't believe they'll have time to hunt up horses for us, Genevieve. Really, I don't think we ought to ask them to."
It is a question, however, if that afternoon, even Tilly wanted to ride; for, according to Cordelia's notes that night in "Things to do," they saw a broncho "bursted."
It was Mr. Tim who had said at the dinner table that noon:
"If you young people happen to be on hand, say at about four o'clock, you'll see something doing. Reddy's got a horse or two he's going to put through their paces—and one of 'em's never been saddled."
"Are you sure, Mr. Hartley, the girls ought to witness such a sight?" she asked uneasily. "Of course I don't want to be too strict in my demands," she went on with a little twinkle in her eyes that Mr. Hartley thoroughly13 understood. "I realize the West isn't the East. But, will this be—all right?"
"I think it will—even in your judgment," he assured her. "It's no professional broncho-buster that they'll see to-day. I seldom hire them, anyway, as I prefer to have our own men break in the horses—specially14 as we're lucky enough to have three or four mighty15 skillful ones right in our own outfit16. There'll be nothing brutal17 or rough to-day, Mrs. Kennedy. Only one beast is entirely18 wild, and he's not really vicious, Reddy says. Genevieve tells me the girls have heard a lot about broncho-busting, and that they're wild to see it. They wouldn't think they'd been to Texas, I'm afraid, if they didn't see something of the sort."
"Very well," agreed Mrs. Kennedy, with visible reluctance19.
"Oh, of course," went on Mr. Hartley, his eyes twinkling, "you mustn't expect that they'll see exactly a pony20 parade drawing baby carriages down Beacon21 Street; but they will see some of the best horsemanship that the state of Texas can show. I take it you never saw a little beast whose chief aim in life was to get clear of his rider—eh, Mrs. Kennedy?"
"No, I never did," shuddered22 the lady; "and I'm not sure that I'd want to," she finished decisively, as she turned away.
The new horse proved to be a fiery23 little bay mustang, and the fight began from the first moment that the noose24 settled about his untamed little neck. As Tilly told of the affair in the Chronicles of the Hexagon Club, it was like this:
"We saw a broncho busted25 this afternoon. Reddy busted it, and he was splendid. Mercy! I shall never think anything my old Beauty does is bad again. Beauty is a snail26 and a saint beside this jumping, plunging27, squealing28 creature that never by any chance was on his feet properly—except when he came down hard on all four of them at once with his back humped right up in the middle in a perfectly29 frightful30 fashion—and I suppose that wasn't 'properly.' Anyhow, I shouldn't have thought it was, if I had had to try to sit on that hump!
"But that wasn't the only thing that he did. Dear me, no! He danced, and rolled, and seesawed31 up and down—'pitching,' Mr. Hartley called it. And I'm sure it looked like it. First he'd try standing32 on his two fore7 feet, then he'd give them a rest, and take the other two. And sometimes he couldn't seem to make up his mind which he wanted to use, or which way he wanted to turn, and he'd change about right up in the air so he'd come down facing the other way. My, he was the most uncertain creature!
"It didn't seem to make a mite33 of difference where the horse was, or what he did with his feet, though. Reddy was right there every time, and all[114] ready, too. (Yes, I know a pun is the lowest order of wit. But I don't care. I couldn't help it, anyway—it was such a ready one!) There he sat, so loose and easy, too, with his quirt (that's a whip), and it looked sometimes just as if he wasn't half trying—that he didn't need to. But I'm sure he was trying. Anyhow, I know I couldn't have stayed on that horse five minutes; and I don't believe even Genevieve could. (I said that to Mr. Tim Nolan, and he laughed so hard I thought I'd put it in here, and let somebody else laugh.)
"Of course every one of us was awfully34 excited, and the boys kept shouting and cheering, and yelling 'Stay with him!' and telling him not to 'go to leather'—whatever that may mean! And Reddy did stay. He stayed till the little horse got tired out; then he got off, and led the horse away, and some of the other boys went through a good deal the same sort of thing with other horses, only these had all been partly broken before, they told us. But, mercy, they were bad enough, anyhow, I thought, to have been brand-new. Reddy did another one, too, and this time he put silver half-dollars under his feet in the stirrups: And when the little beast—the horse, I mean, not Reddy—got through his antics, there the half-dollars were, still there in the same old place. How the boys did yell and cheer then!
"After that, they all just 'showed off' for us, throwing their ropes over anything and everything, and playing like a crowd of little boys on a picnic, only Mr. Hartley said they were doing some 'mighty fine roping' with it all. Their ropes are mostly about forty feet long, and it looked as if they just slung35 them any old way; but I know they don't, for afterward36, just before we went in to supper, Reddy let me take his rope, and I tried to throw it. I aimed for a post a little way ahead of me, but I got Pedro, the Mexican cowboy, behind me, right 'in the neck,' as Mr. Tim said. Pedro grinned, and of course everybody else laughed horribly.
"And thus endeth the account of how the bronchos were busted. (P.S. I hope whoever reads the above will own up that for once Tilly Mack got some sense into her part. So there!) I forgot to say we took a nap after dinner. Everybody does here. 'Siestas37' they call them, Genevieve says."
It was after supper that Genevieve said:
"Now let's go out on to the front gallery and watch the sunset. Supper was too late last night for us to see much of it, but to-night it will be fine—and you've no idea what a sunset really can be until you've seen it on the prairie!"
Tilly pursed her lips.
"There, Genevieve Hartley, there's another of those mysterious words of yours; and it isn't the first time I've heard it here, either."
"What word?"
"'Gallery.' What is a gallery? I'm sure I don't see what there can be about a one-story house to be called a 'gallery'!"
Genevieve laughed.
"Oh, is that it?" frowned Tilly. "But you never called Sunbridge piazzas that."
Genevieve shook her head.
"No; it's only when I get back here that the old names come back to me so naturally. Besides—when I was East, I very soon found out what you called them; so I called them that, too."
"Well, anyhow," retorted Tilly, saucily, "I've got my opinion of folks that will call a one-story piazza39 a 'gallery.' I should just like to show them what we call a 'gallery' at home—say, the top one in the Boston Theater, you know, where it runs 'way back."
Genevieve only laughed good-naturedly.
On the front gallery all settled themselves comfortably to watch the sunset. Already the sun was low in the west, a huge ball of fire just ready to drop into the sea of prairie grass.
"It doesn't seem nearly so hot here as I thought it would," observed Bertha, after a time. "Oh, it's been warm to-day, of course—part of the time awfully warm," she added hastily. "But I've been just as hot in New Hampshire."
"We think we've got a mighty fine climate," spoke up Mr. Hartley. "Now, last year, you in the East, had heaps of prostrations from the heat. Texas had just three."
"I suppose that was owing to the Northers," murmured Cordelia, interestedly. "Now, feel it!" She put up her hand. "There's a breeze, now. Is that a Norther?"
Mr. Hartley coughed suddenly. Genevieve stared.
"What do you know about Northers?" she demanded.
"Why, I—I read about them. It said you—you had them."
Genevieve broke into a merry laugh.
"I should think, by the way you put it, that they were the measles41 or the whooping42 cough! We do have them, Cordelia—in the winter, specially, but not so often in July. Besides, they don't feel much like this little breeze—as you'd soon find out, if you happened to be in one."
For a moment there was silence; then Genevieve spoke again.
"See here, where'd you find out all these things about Texas—that we didn't have butter, and did have Northers?"
"I'll tell you, Genevieve, just where they found out," she cut in, utterly44 ignoring her own share of the "they." "Now, listen! How do you suppose they spent all the time you were in New Jersey45? I'll tell you. They were digging up Texas every single minute; and they dug, and dug, and dug, until there wasn't a mean annual temperature, or a mean anything else that they didn't drag from its hiding-place and hold up triumphantly46, and shout: 'Behold47, this is Texas!'"
"Girls—you didn't!" cried Genevieve, choking with laughter.
"They did!" affirmed Tilly.
"Yes, we did—including Tilly," declared Cordelia, with unexpected spirit.
Everybody laughed this time, but it was Alma, the peacemaker, who spoke next.
"Oh, look—look at the sun!" she exclaimed. "Aren't those rose-pink clouds gorgeous?"
"My, wouldn't they make a lovely dress?" sighed Elsie.
"Yes, and see the golden pathway the sun has made, straight down to the prairie," cried Bertha Brown.
Mr. Hartley shook his head.
"No—I hope not."
"But you do have prairie fires?"
"Sometimes; but not so often nowadays—though I've seen some bad ones, in my time."
There was a long silence. All eyes were turned toward the west. Above, a riot of rose and gold and purple flamed across the sky. Below, more softly, the colors seemed almost repeated in the waving, shifting, changing expanse of fairylike loveliness that the prairie had become.
"Oh, how beautiful it all is, and how I do love it," breathed Genevieve, after a time, as if to herself.
Gradually the gorgeous rose and gold and purple changed, softened49, and faded quite away. The slender crescent of the moon appeared, and one by one the stars showed in the darkening sky.
"It's all so quiet, so wonderfully quiet," sighed Cordelia; then, abruptly50, she cried: "Why, what's that?"
There had sounded a far-away shout, then another, nearer. On the breeze was borne the muffled51 tread of hundreds of hoofs52. A dog began to bark lustily.
"On the way to a round-up, probably," explained Mr. Hartley, as he rose to his feet and went to meet the foreman, who was coming toward the house.
"They've put them in our pens for the night. The boys have gone into camp a mile or so away."
Genevieve shuddered.
"I hate round-ups," she cried passionately54.
"What are round-ups?" asked Bertha Brown.
"Where they brand the cattle," answered Genevieve, quickly, but in a low voice.
Cordelia, who was near her, shuddered. She seemed now to see before her eyes that seething55 mass of heads and horns, sweeping56 on and on unceasingly.
Cordelia had two dreams that night. She wondered, afterward, which was the worse. She dreamed, first, that an endless stream of cattle climbed the windmill tower and jumped clear to the edge of the prairie, where the sun went down. She dreamed, secondly57, that she was very hungry, and that twenty feet away stood a table laden58 with hot biscuits and fried chicken; but that the only way she could obtain any food was to "rope it" with Reddy's lariat59. At the time of waking up she had not obtained so much as one biscuit or a chicken wing.
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1
ranch
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| n.大牧场，大农场 | |
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2
misty
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| adj.雾蒙蒙的，有雾的 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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vestige
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| n.痕迹，遗迹，残余 | |
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constraint
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| n.(on)约束，限制；限制(或约束)性的事物 | |
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linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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7
fore
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| adv.在前面；adj.先前的；在前部的；n.前部 | |
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sleek
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| adj.光滑的，井然有序的；v.使光滑，梳拢 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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10
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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saucily
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| adv.傲慢地，莽撞地 | |
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12
privately
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| adv.以私人的身份，悄悄地，私下地 | |
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13
thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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14
specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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15
mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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outfit
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| n.（为特殊用途的）全套装备，全套服装 | |
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brutal
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| adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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reluctance
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| n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿 | |
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pony
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| adj.小型的；n.小马 | |
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beacon
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| n.烽火，（警告用的）闪火灯，灯塔 | |
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22
shuddered
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| v.战栗( shudder的过去式和过去分词 )；发抖；（机器、车辆等）突然震动；颤动 | |
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fiery
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| adj.燃烧着的，火红的；暴躁的；激烈的 | |
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24
noose
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| n.绳套，绞索（刑）；v.用套索捉；使落入圈套；处以绞刑 | |
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25
busted
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| adj. 破产了的，失败了的，被降级的，被逮捕的，被抓到的 动词bust的过去式和过去分词 | |
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26
snail
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| n.蜗牛 | |
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27
plunging
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| adj.跳进的，突进的v.颠簸( plunge的现在分词 )；暴跌；骤降；突降 | |
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squealing
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| v.长声尖叫，用长而尖锐的声音说( squeal的现在分词 ) | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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frightful
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| adj.可怕的；讨厌的 | |
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seesawed
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| v.使上下（来回）摇动( seesaw的过去式和过去分词 )；玩跷跷板，上下（来回）摇动 | |
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32
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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mite
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| n.极小的东西；小铜币 | |
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34
awfully
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| adv.可怕地，非常地，极端地 | |
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35
slung
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| 抛( sling的过去式和过去分词 )； 吊挂； 遣送； 押往 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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siestas
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| n.（气候炎热国家的）午睡，午休( siesta的名词复数 ) | |
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38
verandas
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| 阳台，走廊( veranda的名词复数 ) | |
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39
piazza
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| n.广场；走廊 | |
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piazzas
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| n.广场，市场( piazza的名词复数 ) | |
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41
measles
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| n.麻疹，风疹，包虫病，痧子 | |
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42
whooping
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| 发嗬嗬声的，发咳声的 | |
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43
chuckling
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| 轻声地笑( chuckle的现在分词 ) | |
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44
utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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45
jersey
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| n.运动衫 | |
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46
triumphantly
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| ad.得意洋洋地；得胜地；成功地 | |
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behold
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| v.看，注视，看到 | |
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48
gasped
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| v.喘气( gasp的过去式和过去分词 )；喘息；倒抽气；很想要 | |
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49
softened
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| （使）变软( soften的过去式和过去分词 )； 缓解打击； 缓和； 安慰 | |
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50
abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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51
muffled
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| adj.（声音）被隔的；听不太清的；（衣服）裹严的；蒙住的v.压抑，捂住( muffle的过去式和过去分词 )；用厚厚的衣帽包着（自己） | |
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52
hoofs
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| n.（兽的）蹄，马蹄( hoof的名词复数 )v.（兽的）蹄，马蹄( hoof的第三人称单数 ) | |
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53
thronging
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| v.成群，挤满( throng的现在分词 ) | |
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54
passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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55
seething
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| 沸腾的，火热的 | |
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56
sweeping
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| adj.范围广大的，一扫无遗的 | |
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57
secondly
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| adv.第二，其次 | |
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58
laden
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| adj.装满了的；充满了的；负了重担的；苦恼的 | |
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lariat
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| n.系绳，套索；v.用套索套捕 | |
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