The Horse Whisperer

A

All that really worked were some abstract splatter paintings done by Grace at the age of three that A

Over the tops of these A

'So. You want to sue him?'

A

'A libel that'll be repeated a hundred times over if we sue. And blown up into a much bigger story.'

A

'Don, you're not going soft on me are you? Fenimore Fiske is a bitter, twisted, talentless, spiteful old toad.'

Farlow put up his hands, gri

'Don't hold back A

'While he was here he did all he could to stir up trouble and now he's gone he's trying to do the same. I want to burn his wrinkled ass.'

'Is that an English expression?'

'No, we'd say apply heat to his aging fundament.'

'Well, you're the boss. Fundamentally.'

'You better believe it.'

One of the phones on A

Chapter Two

A

Thus prepared, she flew to Senegal in West Africa and after a brief stay in the capital, Dakar, set off on the dusty five-hundred-mile ride south in an open-sided bus crammed with people, chickens and goats, to the small town that was to be her home for the next twelve months. On the second day, as night fell, they arrived at the banks of a great river.

The night air was hot and damp and clamorous with insects and A

They told her there was a tubab living nearby who would surely put her up. Without the faintest idea of what a tubab might be, A

He was a Peace Corps volunteer and had been there a year, teaching English and building wells. He was twenty-four, a Harvard graduate and the most intelligent person A

And, like a lawyer, he cross-examined A

The following morning Robert took her in his jeep across on the ferry and delivered her safely to the Catholic convent where she was to live and teach for the coming year under the only occasionally disapproving eye of the mother superior, a kindly and conveniently myopic French-Canadian.

Over the course of the next three months, A

Then Robert was transferred up to Dakar and the evening before he went, A

Only when he had gone and she met other Peace Corps volunteers, did she realize how unusual he was. Most of the others were dope-heads or bores or both. There was one guy with glazed, pink eyes and a headband who claimed he'd been high for a year.

She saw Robert once more when she went back up to Dakar to fly home the following July. Here people spoke another language called Wolof and he was already fluent. He was living out near the airport, so near that you had to stop talking whenever a plane went over. To make some virtue of this, he had got hold of a huge directory detailing every flight in and out of Dakar and, after two nights studying it, knew it by heart. When a plane flew over he would recite the name of the airline, its origin, route and destination. A

They didn't see each other again for seven years. A