Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/118

106 Burls for falling from the horse. There were some awkward moments before the performance began to go smoothly again, and in the mean-time the defiant Milly lost her flush of impetuous ill-temper and began to consider the explanation she would have to make after her somersaults were finished and she faced her father in the wings.

Her success as a bareback rider was all that remained between him and the poverty of a circus acrobat's old age. He had taught and trained her. He watched over her talent, now, with the fierce jealousy of an old miser. He dictated what she was to eat. He saw to it that she kept light and supple. He went about with her like a Spanish duenna, afraid of the inevitable love affair that would mean the beginning of her end; for the laws of nature do not allow a matron to do horseback tumbling, and even maturity itself is an enemy to the agility of the equestrienne.

She knew how he would storm at her for having marred her act, and the knowledge made her anxious at a time when she should have had every faculty undistracted, every nerve tense. She made her first somersault successfully, with an accuracy almost automatic, quite unthinkingly. But as she gathered herself for her second leap she wakened suddenly to an unreadiness of mind that became a consciousness of impending failure as her body launched into its spring. Her brain seemed to hang back, fumbling with the messages it should have sent to the responding muscles; and in mid-air she found herself frantically "cast," dead of