iser in the life
of the wilderness. As it was, he trotted on through a skirting of
shrubbery and on the verge of a clearing was stopped by a snarl that
rolled out of the ground at his feet. Then he saw a dead deer on the
ground and over it a great tawny creature. One paw lay on the flank of
its prey; the bloody muzzle was just above.

There is no greater coward than the puma. Ordinarily she would have
hesitated before attacking the grown horse, but the surprise made her
desperate. She sprang even as Alcatraz whirled for flight, and in
whirling he saw that there was no escape from the leap of this monster
with the yawning teeth. He kicked high and hard, eleven hundred pounds
of seasoned muscle concentrated in the drive. The blow would have
smashed in the side of a bull. One hoof glanced off, but the other
struck fair and full between the eyes of the mountain-lion. The great
cat spun backwards, screeching, but Alcatraz saw no more than the fall.
He fled up the mountain with fear of death lightening his strides,
regardless of footing, crashing through underbrush, and came to the end
of his hysterical flight at the crest of the slope.

There he paused, shaking and weak, but the mountain top was bare of
covert, and scanning it eagerly through the treacherous moonlight he saw
there was no immediate danger. Down the Western slopes he saw a
fairyland for horses. Far beyond rose a second range nearly as lofty as
the peak on which he stood, but in between tumbled rolling ground, a
dreamy panorama in the moonshine. One feature was clear, and that was a
broad looping of silver among the hills, a river with slender
tributaries dodging swiftly down to it from either side. Alcatraz looked
with a swelling heart, thinking of the white-hot deserts which he had
known all his life. The wind which lifted his mane and cooled his hot
body carried up, also, the delicious fragrance of the evergreens and it
seemed to Alcatraz that he had come in view of a promised land. Surely
he had dreamed of it on many a day in burning, dusty corrals or in
oven-like sheds.

The descent was far less precipitous than the climb and far shorter to
the plateau. Just where the true mountains broke out into a pleasant
medley of foothills, the stallion stopped to rest. He nibbled a few
mouthfuls of grass growing lush and rank on the edge of a watercourse,
waded to the knees in a still pool and blotted out the star-images with
the disturbance of his drinking, and t