“I beg your pardon, miss. I was just admiring the transformation in old Juggernaut.”
“His name is Orfeo!” I said with more annoyance than was necessary, and then I saw who it was. The short, dapper man from the stands. And he stood head-even with mine.
“And you were his Eurydice?” he asked with a grin of such charisma that I stared at him a moment.
“Nnnnooo.” I slipped past him as fast as I could. He looked the type who pinches. Short men do take odd ways of manifesting masculinity, most of them offensive.
By leading Phi Bete past, I forced him up against the box stall. I saw his apprehensive backward glance at Orfeo.
“He certainly has changed, ma’am,” Shorty said with commendable aplomb. “Last time I saw him, he was trying to sample a hostler’s hand for breakfast.”
“There’s nothing hungry about him now.” I slipped the bridle from Phi Bete and held sugar to her lips, reassured by the velvet caress as she daintily nibbled her reward. She had plenty of good timothy hay. At least I got my money’s worth on that. You had to be careful about hay. Dad used to bring his with him whenever he did the track circuit.
“Seeing’s believing, but I had to see it once I’d heard he was here,” the man admitted, lifting his hat to scratch his wavy hair, the picture of bucolic incredulity.
He grinned again, his blue eyes twinkling in the friendliest way. “Can I spot you a cup of coffee and learn the secret of your success?”
I was suddenly very conscious of my sticky clothes, of my bra showing through the damp shirt, my sweat-dried hair, although he wasn’t looking at me that way. He was looking me square in the eye, and we were eye-level, though the stall separated us. I wondered if he found such parity as unusual as I did.
“You should have taken the blue, you know,” he went on, “but Bess Tomlinson has to win her quota to hold her head up at the country club. And with her string, if she doesn’t get ‘em early in the season, she’s out of luck!”
“Which of the judges is she married to?” He laughed at my cynicism, and it was a real laugh, not one of those social whinnies. He laughed with his head back, his mouth wide open, so I could see he had very few fillings in his even white teeth. If I’d been buying a pony stud, he’d ‘ve been a bargain.
“I don’t think she sleeps with the Colonel,” he said, his eyes gleaming with pure malice for a moment, “but…”
I couldn’t go on standing there in Phi Bete’s stall, but I really didn’t know what to do. I certainly didn’t want to get chummy with any circuit riders. Dad had warned me against that long, long ago. You made your appearances in the show ring, not the bars and the fancy night spots near the shows. And you took care of your stock, not your libido, or you became fair game for everyone. I couldn’t suppress my involuntary shudder, and Eager Blue-eyes caught it.
“You haven’t had any trouble with the Colonel, have you?”
“No. No.” But I would glance toward Orfeo, for I knew that the Colonel had been in the steward’s office when I checked in. And it was apparent that the Colonel had been judging shows long enough on the East Coast to recognize that “fence-swallowing, man-eating” black gelding Juggernaut.
“Give you any trouble with Jug-Orfeo? Sorry, habit.”
I’m not the kind to jump to conclusions and point fingers, but I was so sure that the steward had originally told me D-Barn. Then he’d come out of his office in an awful hurry to correct me, and the Colonel had been in there.
“Yes,” Shorty said sourly, “he did.” Then he jerked his head toward Orfeo’s cocked hip. “He is reformed?”
I took my opportunity, left Phi Bete’s stall, and slipped into Orfeo’s, crooning to him as I always did, though, Lord knows, he was smart enough to know that I was the only person who ever entered his stall.
Orfeo arched his neck and ducked his head around, his deep eyes warm and loving, his scarred lips pouting out with old lesions nothing would heal. My hand, running up the gleaming black hide, slid across old spur and whip scars, up the curved muscular neck that gelding hadn’t thinned. I always felt smaller-and bigger-next to Orfeo. Small because he was a giant of a beast, like those in medieval days who could carry a knight in full armor all day; and big because I, Nialla Donnel… Dunn (one day I’d stumbled over that name aloud) had tamed the volcanic fury of the poor benighted creature.
Then Shorty was in the stall beside me, and his voice seemed to have dropped two full notes, to a deep affectionate murmur. He ran his hand fearlessly along Orfeo’s rump. It was a short-fingered, wide-palmed hand, a strong hand; the fingers were well-shaped, the tips sensitive, the nails pared neatly; an odd hand for a man like him, somehow, a contradiction. A man like him? I scarcely knew him. But I wanted to.
He talked to horses the right way. I stood at Orfeo’s head now, and he nudged me out of the way to look back, with idle curiosity, at this brave mortal. Orfeo farruped softly… acknowledgment? welcome? approval? And then, displaying massive equine indifference, Orfeo bent his head to lip up hay. As he began to munch, his eyelids drooped contemplatively.
“Yes, ma’am, I never would have believed it,” Shorty said, the grin on his lips echoed by his eyes.
Dad always said to trust a man whose eyes smile when he does. I suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen any smiling men for a long time. Shorty backed respectfully out of the stall and looked at me expectantly through the upper bars.
“Coffee? Or, in this weather, iced coffee? Coke? Right out in public, too!” The grin was crooked, and the smile didn’t light up his eyes as much. In fact, Shorty suddenly looked as wary as I felt. “God in heaven, what’s this?” he cried, jumping back and glancing down.
Dice announced his presence with a loud satisfied “brrow” and leaped effortlessly to Orfeo’s rump.
“Don’t tell me,” the visitor begged. “That… that mountain lion… is Eurydice, which, I might add, is a misnomer,” for he glared at me, aware of the cat’s maleness.
I giggled. I couldn’t help it. He was funny. He was even… cute. Though that’s a word I hate, and highly inappropriate for this short blue-eyed man who could not be described by a single convenient adjective.
Now he cocked his head to one side as if he, in turn, found me cute… and funny. Then I realized something else. He spoke in various twists of accent, but he knew what good speech was, and he had pronounced “Eurydice” correctly. Not “Ur-dis” or “Err-you-dice,” but “You-ri-di-che” in the proper Italianate fashion. The man was a contradiction. An intelligent, educated circuit rider?
“Who led whom out of hell? And which hell?” he asked then in a complete change of tone. He had jammed his fists against the elegant hand-stitched belt that held up those body-clinging peg-legged breeches on his no-hipped frame. I noticed something else about him at that level and quickly looked up, anywhere but at the telltale and extraordinary bulge.
A sudden flood of curses, horse squealings and thudding hooves, the slap of a crop against flesh, and a chorus of suggestions distracted us both. Someone was using the practice ring outside G-Barn. Phi Bete snorted a soft question, her ears working back and forth, but old Orfeo took no notice of the ruckus.
“Hey,” exclaimed Shorty, his eyes glinting oddly, “can anyone manage him now? I mean, I know I could step inside the stall, but you were at his head…”
“He’s perfectly manageable and trustworthy.”
That grin again, disarming me of my caustic mood.
“Even with me?”
“Yes!”
Without seeming to move with any speed, he was in the stall, telling Dice to get down, untying the halter rope, pressing against Orfeo’s chest to angle him into the far corner of the box so he could lead him out head first.