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 struck like a ruin, falling from the sky, went up again with demon-like activity, once more descended—­once more hurtled wildly aloft—­and repeated this maneuver with a swiftness utterly bewildering.

Had some diabolical wind, together with a huge, volcanic force, taken insane possession of the animal, to fire him skyward, whirl him about, thrash him down viciously and fling him up again, time after time, he could not have churned with greater violence.

He never came down in the same place twice, but he always came down stiff-legged.  The jolt was sickening.  All about, in a narrow, earth-cut circle he bucked, beginning to grunt and warm to his work and hence to increase the deviltry and malice of his actions.

Van had yelled but that once.  He saw nothing, knew nothing, save a dizzy world, abruptly gone crazy about him.

To Beth it seemed as if the horror would never have an end.  One glimpse she had of Van’s white face, but nothing could it tell of his strength or the lack thereof.  She felt she must look and look till he was killed.  There could be no other issue, she was sure.  And for herself there could be no escape from the awful fascination of the merciless brute, inflicting this torture on the man.