ave his errand over early, to have seen the Kid and
to have turned back toward the ranch before noon. For he knew the town's
habit of late sleeping and he wanted to be gone from it before it was
awake and pouring into its long street and into its many swinging doors
the stream of men whom he had no wish to see now. Perfectly well he knew
how easily he could find trouble there, and it seemed to him that he had
enough on his hands already without seeking to add to it.

But the press of range business kept him later than he had thought it
would. And then the one horse on the range he would ride today had to be
found out in the hills and roped.

"For," he told himself grimly, "if I'm going to stick my nose in that
man's town I'm going to have a horse between my knees that knows how to
do something more than creep! And when it comes to horses there's only
one real horse I ever saw. I got you, Comet, you old son-of-a-gun!"

And his rope flew out and its wide noose landed with much precision,
drawing tight about the neck of a great, lean barrelled, defiant-eyed
four-year-old that in the midst of its headlong flight stopped with feet
bunched together before the rope had grown taut. The animal, standing
now like a horse cut from a block of grey granite, chiselled by the
hands of a great sculptor who at the same time was a great lover of
equine perfection, swung about upon its captor, its eyes blazing, just a
little quiver of the clean-cut nostrils showing the red satin of the
skin lining them. The mane was like a tumbled silken skein, the ears
dainty and small and keen pointed, the chest splendidly deep and strong;
the forelegs small, so slender that to a man who did not know a horse
they would have seemed fragile but only because they were all bone and
sinew like steel and muscle hardened and stripped clean of the last
milligram of fat, as exquisite as the perfect ankle of a high bred
woman.

"Part greyhound and part steam engine and part devil!" Thornton muttered
with vast approval shining in his eyes. "And _all horse_! A man could
ride you right through hell, Little Horse, and come out the other side
and never smell your hair burn!"

He drew saddle and bridle from the animal he had been riding and turned
it loose. Then coiling his rope as he went, he came up to Comet's
high-lifted head. With much evident distaste but with what looked like
too much pride to struggle in an encounter in which he knew that he was
to be overc