Barbara rode fast to where Chet lay face-down in the dust and tanglewood beside the trail.
Sitting confidently in the saddle, she looked down at him.
"You okay?"
"Fucking gluebag threw me!"
Chet was unable to believe it himself while he sat on the ground with his knees up, and ran a hand through his thick blue-black hair. There was dirt and some scratches on his handsome face that he wasn't aware of. One of his jodhpur-covered knees was bruised, and the front of his silk shirt torn.
Barbara began dismounting. "Guess your horse just didn't want to race."
She offered a hand to help Chet off the ground. Instead he grabbed her wrist and pulled her down on top of him. He smothered her mouth with hard, angry kisses, then cupped both of his hands over her breasts.
Barbara tried to fight him off, but the fall from his horse and having lost the race, to prove his supremacy over her, put him in a fury she was unable to defend herself against.
He tore at her sweater, then ripped her blouse open and threw himself on her. It would do her no good to scream for help, they were too far in the woods.
While Chet angrily unzipped his riding pants, Barbara took advantage of the moment his hands were off of her to put two fingers in her mouth. The ear-splitting whistle she gave out with, something she had learned to do as a girl on the streets of Chicago, startled her attacker.
Almost instantly, as if from out of nowhere, Barbara's mount came charging up to them. She rolled out of her horse's way and let him rear up on his hind legs and threaten Chet.
Chet covered his head with his hands. "Call the damn thing off of me!"
Barbara took her stallion's reins and calmed him, then gently walked him away. The last she saw Chet, when she was mounted again and starting to ride back to the stables, he was still sitting on the ground with his knees up. His head was up, too, and he was cursing a blue streak into the thin air over his beautiful but miserable head.
It was the second time a boy or man had tried to take her, and Barbara found the latest experience to be even more upsetting than the first. Yet, she laughed as she leaned over and patted her stallion's right cheek. Then she began singing a cowboy tune she had recently heard, thinking how aptly it applied to Chet Armstrong the Fourth... "I'm riding for a fall..."