rive in St. Paul nearly twelve hours before me. I
then telegraphed the officers of the road to see that he did not
suffer and composed myself as well as I could for the long wait.

At St. Paul I hurried to the freight office and found the horse had
been put in a stable. I sought the stable, and there, among the big
dray horses, looking small and trim as a racer, was the lost horse,
eating merrily on some good Minnesota timothy. He was just as much at
ease there as in the car or the boat or on the marshes of the Skeena
valley, but he was still a half-day's ride from his final home.

I bustled about filling up another car. Again for the last time I
sweated and tugged getting feed, water, and bedding. Again the
railway hands marvelled and looked askance. Again some one said,
"Does it pay to bring a horse like that so far?"

"Pay!" I shouted, thoroughly disgusted, "does it pay to feed a dog
for ten years? Does it pay to ride a bicycle? Does it pay to bring up
a child? Pay--no; it does not pay. I'm amusing myself. You drink beer
because you like to, you use tobacco--I squander my money on a
horse." I said a good deal more than the case demanded, being hot and
dusty and tired and--I had broken loose. The clerk escaped through a
side door.

Once more I closed the bars on the gray and saw him wheeled out into
the grinding, jolting tangle of cars where the engines cried out like
some untamable flesh-eating monsters. The light was falling, the
smoke thickening, and it was easy to imagine a tragic fate for the
patient and lonely horse.

Delay in getting the car made me lose my train and I was obliged to
take a late train which did not stop at my home. I was still paying
for my horse out of my own bone and sinew. At last the luscious green
hills, the thick grasses, the tall corn-shocks and the portly
hay-stacks of my native valley came in view and they never looked so
abundant, so generous, so entirely sufficing to man and beast as now
in returning from a land of cold green forests, sparse grass, and icy
streams.

At ten o'clock another huge freight train rolled in, Ladrone's car
was side-tracked and sent to the chute. For the last time he felt the
jolt of the car. In a few minutes I had his car opened and a plank
laid.

"Come, boy!" I called. "This is home."

He followed me as before, so readily, so trustingly, my heart
responded to his affection. I swung to the saddle. With neck arched
high and with a proud and lofty s