But each spring was met by the unvarying whip-blow that by its very weight deflected him in the air. Though his teeth each time clipped together perilously close to the man's leg, each time he fell back to earth he had to gather himself together and run at his own top speed in order to overtake the terror-stricken man on the crazy-galloping horse.
Enrico Piccolomini saw the chase and was himself in at the finish;and the affair, his one great adventure in the world, gave him wealth as well as material for conversation to the end of his days. Enrico Piccolomini was a wood-chopper on the Kennan Ranch.
On a rounded knoll, overlooking the road, he had first heard the galloping hoofs of the horse and the crack of the whip-blows on its body. Next, he had seen the running battle of the man, the horse, and the dog. When directly beneath him, not twenty feet distant, he saw the dog leap, in its queer silent way, straight up and in to the down-smash of the whip, and sink its teeth in the rider's leg. He saw the dog, with its weight, as it fell back to earth, drag the man half out of the saddle. He saw the man, in an effort to recover his balance, put his own weight on the bridle-reins. And he saw the horse, half-rearing, half-tottering and stumbling, overthrow the last shred of the man's balance so that he followed the dog to the ground.
"And then they are like two dogs, like two beasts," Piccolomini was wont to tell in after-years over a glass of wine in his little hotel in Glen Ellen. "The dog lets go the man's leg and jumps for the man's throat. And the man, rolling over, is at the dog's throat. Both his hands--so--he fastens about the throat of this dog. And the dog makes no sound. He never makes sound, before or after. After the two hands of the man stop his breath he can not make sound. But he is not that kind of a dog. He will not make sound anyway. And the horse stands and looks on, and the horse coughs. It is very strange all that I see.