impossible of submission. She only knew that her heart was beating
rapidly, painfully, that her breath came in gasps, that her whole
nervous system was involved in some manner of anguish. She saw the
Chinese cook run past to witness the game, but all her faculties were
focused on the man and horse--both sinister, tense, and grim.

Van had not turned in Beth's direction. He was wholly unaware of her
presence. He halted when the horse was well out towards the center of
the open, and the outlaw braced awkwardly, as if to receive an attack.

With the bridle reins held in his hand at the pommel of the saddle, Van
stood for a moment by the chestnut's side, then, with incredible
celerity of movement, suddenly placed his foot in the stirrup and was
up and well seated before the blinded pony could have moved.

Nothing happened. No one made a sound. No one, apparently, save Beth,
had expected anything to happen. She felt a rush of relief--that came
prematurely.

Van now leaned forward, as the horse remained stiffly braced, and
slipping the blindfold from the pony's eyes, sat back in the saddle
alertly.

Even then the chestnut did not move. He had gone through this ordeal
many times before. He had often been mounted--but not for long at a
time. He had even been exhausted by a stubborn "broncho buster"--some
hardy human burr who could ride a crazy comet--but always he had won in
the end. In a word he had earned his sobriquet, which in broncho-land
is never lightly bestowed.

Van was not in the least deceived. However, he was eager for the
conflict to begin. He had no time to waste. He snatched off his hat,
let out a wild, shrill yell, dug with his spurs and struck the animal a
resounding slap on the flank, that, like a fulminate, suddenly
detonated the pent-up explosives in the beast.

He "lit into" bucking of astounding violence with the quickness of
dynamite.

It was terrific. For a moment Beth saw nothing but a mad grotesquerie
of horse and man, almost ludicrously unnatural, and crazed with
eccentric motion.

The horse shot up in the air like a loose, distorted piece of statuary,
blown from its pedestal by some gigantic disturbance. He appeared to
buckle in his mid-air leap like a bended thing of metal, then dropped
to the earth, stiff-legged as an iron image, to bound up again with mad
and furious gyrations that seemed to the girl to twist both horse and
rider into one live mass of incongruity,

He