Can't you stand a minute ?" "Stella's been devilin' me to get a machine ever since Jim Reid got his," he continued, while the horses were repeating their preliminary contortions, and Patches was regaining his seat.

"But I told her I'd be scared to death to ride in the fool contraption." At this Buck and Prince, in a wild riot of animal strength and spirit, leaped a slight depression in the road with such vigor that the front wheels of the buckboard left the ground.

Patches glanced sidewise at his employer, with a smile of delighted appreciation, but said nothing.
The Dean liked him for that.

The Dean always insists that the hardest man in the world to talk to is the one who always has something to say for himself.
"Why," he continued, with a burst of honest feeling, "if I was ever to bring one of them things home to the Cross-Triangle, I'd be ashamed to look a horse or steer in the face." They dashed through a patch of wild sunflowers that in the bottom lands grow thick and rank; whirled past the tumble-down corner of an old fence that enclosed a long neglected garden; and dashed recklessly through a deserted and weed-grown yard.

On one side of the road was the ancient barn and stable, with sagging, weather-beaten roof, leaning walls and battered doors that hung dejectedly on their rusty and broken hinges.
The corral stockade was breached in many places by the years that had rotted the posts.