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a nice compliment instead of threatening to dump her in a snowdrift.
    “Yes,” she said, smiling sweetly, “I’m still here.”
    Gib shook his head in amazement. He was still feeling pretty flabbergasted as he took down his tack and headed back toward the stall.
    But then there was Silky to think about. She greeted him with her usual gentle nicker and nodded her head in appreciation when he started in with the currycomb. And later when he brought in the bridle she held her head down low and almost reached for the bit.
    “Just look at you taking the bit like that,” Gib whispered. “I know what you’re telling me. You’re saying that you surely are itching to stretch your legs a little.” When the saddle went on she didn’t even hump her back against the tightening of the cinch, but when he opened the stall door she snorted a bit and began to step sideways.
    Gib had almost forgotten about Livy until he heard someone say, “She looks excited, doesn’t she?” and sure enough, there she was. Livy was looking pretty excited herself. Prancing along in her shiny boots, tossing her curly head and rolling her big eyes so that the whites showed.
    “Yep.” Gib grinned. “ ’Pears to be quite a lot of excitement around here. So now we’ll see who’s going to be too excited to listen to reason.”
    Outside the barn in the cold, crisp sunshine Silky skittered a bit when Gib swung himself up into the saddle, but once he was on board and the reins were talking, she settled down some. And when he put her to walking around and around the snow-swept barnyard, she didn’t even dance. But Gib could feel how her slow, tiptoeing walk had dancing right there under the surface. And running was there too. The hot-blooded burning urge to run full out and free, across the open prairie.
    So he kept her walking until her hoofprints had turned the pure white snow of the barnyard into a horseshoe-patterned carpet. And then went on walking some more, even though Livy, watching from just outside the barn door, was obviously getting impatient. Clapping her hands and stomping her feet against the cold, she called out advice now and then. “Why don’t you let her out just a little?” she yelled once, and a little later, “This is getting boring. Let her stretch her legs a little.”
    But Gib only grinned and nodded, and it wasn’t until they’d been around the barnyard maybe fifteen or twenty times that he loosened the reins. Immediately Silky came up against the bit with an excited snort, but when he let her know that a trot was all he was asking for, she reluctantly quieted down with only an occasional head-tossing, tail-swishing, sidestepping flourish to let him know how she was feeling.
    They’d moved on to a slow, controlled lope before Gib realized that his audience had grown some. A stranger, a large man wearing a big Stetson and fancy fringed and silver-mounted chaps, was right there at the edge of the barnyard, sitting on a rangy, Roman-nosed buckskin. Just sitting there quietly as if he’d been there for quite a spell.
    Gib recognized the horse right off. Way back last winter someone had ridden that same buckskin to one of the Thorntons’ dinner parties. Gib remembered taking the winded, lathered-up gelding to the barn and cooling him off a little before putting him in an empty stall. He’d had to go back out then to take care of some other guests’ riding and buggy horses, but when everyone had arrived he went back to the barn and rubbed the buckskin down and gave him a few swallows of water and a small flake of hay. Gib grinned, remembering how the Roman-nosed rascal had thanked him for his trouble by trying to nip him.
    Gib remembered the horse for certain. He wasn’t all that sure about the man, but that wasn’t too surprising. That big old Stetson was sitting so low there wasn’t much face showing under it And truth to tell, Gib had always been better at remembering horses than people.
    Trying to tip his hat