Roberto appeared to lose patience with the animal at last, determined that he was to break it to his will. He faced the horse toward the post, and, gathering his reins with strong hand, rasped his long-spiked spurs across its sides with sudden and vicious sweep.
Henderson heard the horse grunt in terrified pain as it crouched a moment under the barbarous inflection of this torture strange to it. When it sprang to escape, Roberto checked it harshly, bringing it up short, throwing it to its haunches in a cloud of dust. The animal seemed to throw off its terror with this hard usage, and to gather itself in an angry effort to rid its back of the tormentor. It reared, flung its head in wild defiance, arched its back, stopped with stiffened legs braced hard.
Roberto had given it only a gentle foretaste of the agony that lay in the two-inch rowels of his silver-gilt spurs. Now he clamped them to the beast's belly and pressed with slow and growing force, sinking the spikes through the glossy skin. Again the terrified, mad plunge to escape; again the hard, restraining hand. Henderson sweated in the resentment of this cruelty practiced on a creature that could neither strike in defense nor flee out of its tormentor's reach.
Still the horse defied its rider to urge it up to the terrifying cross. The torture of rasping spur, of grinding bit, could not overcome its magnificent spirit of defiance. Roberto drove it forward again and again, with all the mastery of his practiced
