“Edwina always enjoyed a morning ride. Some mornings she rode the horse, and some mornings she rode the groom.”

“Gertrudis got on her horse and rode away. She wasn't riding alone--she carried her childhood beside her, in the cream fritters she had enclosed in a jar in her saddlebag”

“One day Augustus asked Newt to ride along with him, much to Newt’s surprise. In the morning they saw a grizzly, but the bear was far upwind and didn’t scent them. It was a beautiful day—no clouds in the sky. Augustus rode with his big rifle propped across the saddle—he was in the highest of spirits. They rode ahead of the herd some fifteen miles or more, and yet when they stopped to look back they could still see the cattle, tiny black dots in the middle of the plain, with the southern horizon still far behind them.”

“They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”

“If that ain't the biggest bucket of hogwash, I don't know what is," he antagonized. "Hell, more'n likely, after she rode that damn horse to the ground, you jumped into her saddle for a long, hard ride.”

“She was full of some strange energy that morning. Her every movement had purpose and life and she seemed to find satisfaction in every little thing.”