Page:Cherokee Trails (1928).pdf/140

 Tom kept the grunting, bucking, side-swiping team clear of the picket fence and the house. But when the fractious rascals swerved out of hand and took a rod of the fence, the wagon almost grazing the porch, Mrs. Ellison concluded it was time to interfere.

"Take 'em out of here!" she ordered peremptorily, with more authority than reason, shaking her apron at the team to shoo it off.

Simpson was riding limber-legged in the swaying wagon, keeping his feet admirably over fallen fence-posts and horned skulls which had tumbled down from Eudora's mound. He guided the team in a more or less definite circuit of the large space between barn, corral, house and front fence, but he couldn't seem to hit the gate leading out into the road and the wide-open places where a high-minded horse might go till he hit the horizon in his protest against servitude beside a wagon tongue.

Tom was going around that limited enclosure so fast, his attention was so closely set on the work in hand, that he did not notice the arrival of a rider who had pulled up his horse and sat watching the lively proceedings with interest. This man had come up the road from the south, leading two horses, one of which carried his pack. He appeared to be a leisurely going man, in no haste to get wherever he was headed for, slouching limber-backed and restful, one hand on his saddle-horn, as he halted to watch the show.

Whether it was because the leader in that horse rebellion spied these strangers of his own species, or whether he took it into his head to go out where he might