Free Wild Mustang Man by Carol Grace Page B

with one finger and touched its fur. It was soft. It wasn’t so bad. She looked into its beady eyes. Max took that to be a yes. He set the rat in her open palm. She bit her lip, but held her hand steady. The seconds dragged by. “Okay, that’s enough for today,” she said.
    Max nodded and put Barney back in his cage. He beamed his approval at Bridget’s courage. Then they went outside. While Bridget got her camcorder from her car,
    Max went to get his bike. She knelt on the grass and focused her camera while Max came racing down the driveway wearing his helmet and doing wheelies. She smiled, knowing that Josh was nowhere in the vicinity and wouldn’t be back until lunchtime. It was good to know he was just as anxious to avoid her as she was to avoid him.
    From wheelies Max progressed to riding no-handed, grinning impudently at the camera. After each trick Max performed, Bridget cheered loudly, which encouraged him to try even harder. She would have clapped, but she had both hands on the recorder. He finally screeched to a halt in front of her, red-cheeked and out of breath. When she showed him what she’d recorded through her viewfinder, he laughed uproariously and begged her to let him watch it again and again.
    “That’s enough, Max,” she said. “I’ll leave the cassette with you, and you can keep it and watch it whenever you want to. You have a VCR, don’t you?”
    He nodded. “That’s cool. Thanks, Bridget,” he said, remembering his manners. “Now it’s your turn. You do something. I’ll take your picture.”
    She hesitated only a moment. It was an expensive machine, but it would be a good lesson for him in responsibility. “Okay, come here.” She knelt next to him and looped the strap over his neck, then showed him where to squeeze the trigger. “Now don’t bump the lens and try to hold the camera steady. Is it too heavy for you?”
    He held the camera up to his eyes. “Huh-uh. It’s funny. It’s just like a slingshot. You aim and you shoot, right?”
    “Right,” she said.
    “Go ahead, do something,” he said.
    She looked around, suddenly self-conscious.
    “Do a somersault There on the grass.” He pointed to a level grassy area.
    She shrugged. Why not? No one was there. She sat down, tucked her legs under her and rolled over. “How was that?” she asked, picking the grass out of her hair.
    “Good. This is neat. I want one of these kind of cameras.”
    She laughed. It felt good to roll around in the grass. To smell the air. To be in the company of a five-year-old whose only goal was to have a good time. “By the way,” she said casually, looking over her shoulder. “You’re sure your dad isn’t around?”
    He shook his head. “Nope. Why...do you want to take his picture?”
    “No, not today. Today I have to take some pictures of the ranch.”
    “Not yet. I wanna take some more pictures of you. Do a dance, or something.”
    Reassured that Josh was nowhere in the vicinity, Bridget pirouetted around, kicking up her heels, skipping and hopping with crazy abandon, anything to make Max laugh. Which he did.
    “Hey,” she said, “you’re jiggling the camera up and down. You have to hold it steady.”
    “I can’t,” he protested. “Not when I’m laughing.”
    She ran across the grass and picked him and the camera up and spun them around in her arms. “Stop,” he yelled. “I’m the camera man. You can’t pick up the camera man.” His wheat-colored hair tickled her nose, and the camera bounced against her chest.
    When he wriggled so much she had to put him down, she asked for the camera, but he didn’t want to give it up. “I wanna do a whatcha-ma-call-it, where I get up real close.” He pointed the camera at her face.
    “Closeup,” she said.
    “Say a poem or sing a song,” he instructed.
    Bridget obliged by doing two children’s songs, both with gestures. First she sang about a teapot, then about an eensy-weensy spider who climbed up the water spout. They were both