Once, she
whirled and tried to kick him, but usually she strove to strike
him with her fore-hoofs, or rushed upon him with open mouth and
ears laid back in an effort to crunch his backbone between her
teeth. And the wolf-dog, with ears flattened down and crouching,
would slide silkily away, only to circle up to the foal from the
other side and give cause to the mare for new alarm. Then
Daylight, urged on by Dede's solicitude, uttered a low
threatening cry; and Wolf, drooping and sagging in all the body
of him in token of his instant return to man's allegiance, slunk
off behind the barn.
It was a few minutes later that Daylight, breaking off from his
reading to change the streams of irrigation, found that the water
had ceased flowing. He shouldered a pick and shovel, took a
hammer and a pipe-wrench from the tool-house, and returned to
Dede on the porch.
"I reckon I'll have to go down and dig the pipe out," he told
her. "It's that slide that's threatened all winter. I guess
she's come down at last."
"Don't you read ahead, now," he warned, as he passed around the
house and took the trail that led down the wall of the canon.
Halfway down the trail, he came upon the slide.
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