Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/273

 go. We 're like to hit bottom all in a bunch if anybody gets rollicky an' starts tellin' his beast where to head in."

So saying, Original disappeared over the sheer rim of the precipice as if he had ridden off on to the impalpable scum of shadow floating in the void.

Little Tige, all four feet bunched like a mountain goat's, took the slide down a fifteen-foot granite apron smooth as a watch crystal and came up on a lateral ledge fringing fearsome space. Then he turned to the left and ambled carelessly along a precarious footway to the next swift drop. He even paused to stretch his neck and browse the top off a scrubby bush that clung to nothingness below his hoofs as if to show the following and reluctant horses what a devil of a beast he was when it came to playing tag on church steeples. Nickering their fears, the other two patterned their tactics after Tige's.

Now sliding on their haunches so that their tails dragged behind them, now mincingly picking their steps along a shelf no wider than the breadth of a bandanna, twisting at right-angled turns for a leap across the riven bed of a winter's torrent, fetching up against the prickly