The Unflappable Horsewoman of Riverside Avenue

There is a woman in town who has earned much distinction as a rider of refractory horses. When I saw her one evening this week riding in the middle of Riverside Avenue on a shaggy-looking animal without a saddle, she struck me as being not only an unusual but somewhat awkward figure, but I was told that was her favorite method of riding a troublesome animal. She very seldom rides with a saddle. She was brought up on a California horse ranch and learned to ride as soon as she learned to sit alone. She has a passion for horses from the start and has spent her whole life among them. She is now married and makes part of the family income by buying horses that other people cannot ride, breaking them to perfect docility and tractability, and then selling them at an advance. She can handle a bucking cayuse with as much ease and certainty of success as one of Buffalo Bill's cowboys can a wild and devilish Texas broncho or Mexican mustang. She told me she had ridden as far as eighty miles in one day and back the next, and that she believed she was the greatest rider in Montana and Washington combined. Ordinarily, she wears for a riding habit a black skirt fastened about her waist and hanging down a little lower than her dress, but I am told that in the privacy of her own stable yard when she wants to master a particularly stubborn animal, she puts on a pair of her husband's trousers and mounts after the masculine fashion.