On his way to investigate the call made by the woman on the land neighboring the Marshall place, reporting the sounds of gunshots, the Sheriff rounded the last curve approaching the Marshall ranch.  As he made the turn, a muscular, white stallion with an equally pale young woman astride its back suddenly vaulted from the embankment.  The woman’s features appeared vaguely familiar and the Sheriff briefly stared at the duo in shock.  The woman’s long, flowing hair and the horse’s mane and tail were aloft in the wind like misty strands of silk, flailing freely in the breeze as the horse and rider came plunging squarely down onto the center of the Sheriff’s hood.  Behind the horse and rider there came a black and white Border collie.  In a gut wrenching reaction the Sheriff brought the vehicle to a screeching halt in the dirt of the roadway.  Oddly, there was no sound at all, not even as the horse’s hooves impacted the hood.  The animal never faltered as its nostrils flared and its eyes grew wide.

As suddenly as the animal had appeared, he and his smiling rider vanished off into the trees at the edge of the road, just as the astonished Sheriff exited his pickup truck and stood scratching his head, gazing in the direction he’d seen the horse and rider disappear.  Not a mark was left on his hood where there should have been dents from the impact of the horse’s hooves.  Oddly there was not a single track left in the soft powdery dirt of the roadway either.

Still scratching his head in dismayed silence, the lawman climbed back into his truck and drove on to the ranch.  When he pulled the truck into the wide circle near the front of the barn, his eyes met with the large shape of a white horse lying in a heap on the ground.  Extending from beneath the animal was the motionless legs of Ben Marshall.  Beside them lay the lifeless body of a Border collie.

As he approached, the Sheriff recognized the horse as the same one he’d seen just moments before leaping from the embankment.  At that point, he realized why the female rider appeared so familiar as well.  It had been Kelly Marshall astride her beloved Ophthello, but he knew that was impossible; he knew Kelly had just recently been buried.  On the ground in front of him lay the obviously deceased Ophthello; appearing as a large, white mound lying on top of the body of Ben Marshall.  Although a rifle lay on the ground beside the dead souls, further observation revealed that there was not a single mark on the horse.  There was no bullet wound and no sign of obvious trauma to account for the animal’s demise.  Ben Marshall on the other hand had obviously met with a slow, agonizing death, judging by the claw marks left in the dirt where his bloody nails dug deep trenches into the compact surface of clay, and the heels of his boots had dug deep gouges into the hardened soil as well before he succumbed to the slow process of suffocation from the weight of the horse.