For a moment, one awful moment, the girl, jammed between their hot, steaming sides, saw herself beneath their mangling hoofs—her life trodden out in the stall.
She was in the lions’ den—and no mistake. For Paddy, great, clodhopping farmhorse, failing to dislodge her thus, swung his dark haunches, lunged with his front shoulder at the dark partition—to crush her there.
But, quick as thought—before his throbbing side could pin her, the girl’s little bare foot, darting forward, was nestling in the hollow of that brutish neck; five tickling, pink toes were stroking it gently—combing it soothingly.
“Treff told me, Treff—Treff,—if ever a horse tries to rub you off, dart your foot forward into the hollow of his neck!” By waves far subtler than radio, she was reaching out now, imploringly to that boy pal with the amber speck of humor in one gray eye—rider of the clouds and rider of the plains.
Across miles of mountain and valley his mantle seemed flung to her, the mantle of his daring, that cock-o’-pluck—so that, with her right leg stretched out, level, across the cross brute’s shoulder and five little toes seductively curry-combing, she was patting the other side of the swollen neck, with a:
“Steady—boy! Steady, there! Easy—now! Who the deuce can parlez-vous a horse? That’s me! Oh-h! five little pigs went to market.”
Was there ever the Paddy, yet, who could resist such treatment?
Two minutes later a farmer, coming in mad haste and trembling to the barn door, beheld, in the dim dawn a girl queening it in dun trappings of hay upon a perfectly docile farmhorse—which rolled the whites of its eyes at him sheepishly—the great jaws grinding upon a sheaf of hay.
“Good—old—Paddy!” Patronizingly she patted the shoulder that would have rubbed her out, rose to a standing position upon the broad back, her up-flung hand gripping the top of the stall.
Coolly she drew herself up, crept along the dark stall-edge, dropped from the partition into the manger and thence, with a light spring, to the barn floor.
“Where are you—Dorothy? Oh-h! where are—_you_?” she anxiously cried.
“Wal! I swan to goodness there ain’t much ‘woolgathering’ about either o’ you.” The farmer slapped his leg, with a roar. “Oh! I started at midnight fer to tell you about that hayloft floor, jest bone-shanks, bare poles across, widish spaces between ’em—and the hay thinned out in places. But, land! what’s the odds?” He beamed upon Paddy’s rider. “I vum even the Little Lone Lady will never get the better of you.”