d_ he is!" He laughed again
until Happy, across the corral saddling the horse he had chosen,
muttered profanely at the derision he knew was pointed at himself.

"Why, I've seen that hoss--" Andy Green, once fairly started in the
fascinating path of romance, invented details for the pure joy of
creation. If he had written some of the tales he told, and had sold
the writing for many dollars, he would have been famous. Since he did
not write them for profit, but told them for fun, instead, he earned
merely the reputation of being a great liar. A significant mark of his
genius lay in the fact that his inventions never failed to convince;
not till afterward did his audience doubt.

That is why the blue roan was not chosen in any of the strings, but
was left always circling in the corral after a loop had settled. That
is why the Flying U boys looked at him askance as they passed him by.
That is why, when a certain Mr. Coleman, sent by the board of
directors to rake northern Montana for bad horses, looked with favor
upon the blue roan when he came to the Flying U ranch and heard the
tale of his exploits as interpreted--I should say created--by Andy
Green.

"We've got to have him," he declared enthusiastically. "If he's as bad
as all that, he'll be the star performer at the contest, and make that
two-hundred-dollar plum a hard one to pick. Some of these gay boys
have entered with the erroneous idea that that same plum is hanging
loose, and all they've got to do is lean up against the tree and it'll
drop in their mouths. We've got to have that roan. I'll pay you a good
price for him, Whitmore, if you won't let him go any other way. We've
got a reporter up there that can do him up brown in a special article,
and people will come in bunches to see a horse with that kind of a
pedigree. Is it Green, here, that knows the horse and what he'll do?
You're sure of him, are you, Green?"

Andy took time to roll a cigarette. He had not expected any such
development as this, and he needed to think of the best way out. All
he had wanted or intended was to discourage the others from claiming
the blue roan; he wanted him in his own string. Afterwards, when they
had pestered him about the roan's record, he admitted to himself that
he had, maybe, overshot the mark and told it a bit too scarey, and too
convincingly. Under the spell of fancy he had done more than make the
roan unpopular as a roundup horse; he had made him a celebrity in the
wa