r the
first time she felt that the horse is not meant by nature to be the
servant of man but that its speed is meant to ensure it sacred freedom.
A moment later she was wondering how the thought had come to her. That
glimpse of equine perfection had been an illusion built of spirit and
attitude; when the head of the stallion fell she saw the daylight truth:
that this was either the wreck of a young horse or the sad ruin of a
fine animal now grown old. He was a ragged creature with dull eyes and
pendulous lip. No comb had been among the tangles of mane and tail for
an unknown period; no brush had smoothed his coat. It was once a rich
red-chestnut, no doubt, but now it was sun-faded to the color of sand.
He was thin. The unfleshed backbone and withers stood up painfully and
she counted the ribs one by one. Yet his body was not so broken as his
spirit. His drooped head gave him the appearance of searching for a
spot to lie down. He seemed to have been left here by the cruelty of his
owner to starve and die in the white heat of this corral--a desertion
which he accepted as justice because he was useless in the world.

It affected Marianne like the resignation of a man; indeed there was
more personality in the chestnut than in many human beings. Once he had
been a beauty, and the perfection which first startled her had been a
ghost out of his past. His head, where age or famine showed least, was
still unquestionably fine. The ears were short and delicately made, the
eyes well-placed, the distance to the angle of the jaw long--in brief,
it was that short head of small volume and large brain space which
speaks most eloquently of hot blood. As her expert eye ran over the rest
of the body she sighed to think that such a creature had come to such an
end. There was about him no sign of life save the twitch of his skin to
shake off flies.

Certainly this could not be the horse she had been advised to see and
she was about to pass on when she felt eyes watching her from the steep
shadow of the shed which bordered the corral. Then she made out a dapper
olive-skinned fellow sitting with his back against the wall in such a
position of complete relaxation as only a Mexican is capable of
assuming. He wore a short tuft of black moustache cut well away from the
edge of the red lip, a moustache which oddly accentuated his youth. In
body and features he was of that feminine delicacy which your
large-handed Saxon dislikes, and though Mariann