Carley knew she
would never reach it, yet she clung on desperately. What she dreaded was
the return of that stablike pain in her side. It came, and life seemed
something abject and monstrous. She rode stiff legged, with her hands
propping her stiffly above the pommel, but the stabbing pain went right on,
and in deeper. When the mustang halted his trot beside the other horses
Carley was in the last extremity. Yet as Glenn came to her, offering a
hand, she still hid her agony. Then Flo called out gayly: "Carley, you've
done twenty-five miles on as rotten a day as I remember. Shore we all hand
it to you. And I'm confessing I didn't think you'd ever stay the ride out.
Spillbeans is the meanest nag we've got and he has the hardest gait."
CHAPTER V
Later Carley leaned back in a comfortable seat, before a blazing fire that
happily sent its acrid smoke up the chimney, pondering ideas in her mind.
There could be a relation to familiar things that was astounding in its
revelation. To get off a horse that had tortured her, to discover an almost
insatiable appetite, to rest weary, aching body before the genial warmth of
a beautiful fire--these were experiences which Carley found to have been
hitherto unknown delights.
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