r. The lash
whistled narrowly by his red ears, but it never touched them. In the
evening sunlight the Cardinal was a horse of bronze.

Opposite me in the shadow of the tall hickory timber the man Ump,
doubled like a finger, was feeling tenderly over the coffin joints and
the steel blue hoofs of the Bay Eagle, blowing away the dust from the
clinch of each shoe-nail and pressing the flat calks with his thumb. No
mother ever explored with more loving care the mouth of her child for
evidence of a coming tooth. Ump was on his never-ending quest for the
loose shoe-nail. It was the serious business of his life.

I think he loved this trim, nervous mare better than any other thing in
the world. When he rode, perched like a monkey, with his thin legs held
close to her sides, and his short, humped back doubled over, and his
head with its long hair bobbing about as though his neck were
loose-coupled somehow, he was eternally caressing her mighty withers, or
feeling for the play of each iron tendon under her satin skin. And when
we stopped, he glided down to finger her shoe-nails.

Then he talked to the mare sometimes, as he was doing now. "There is a
little ridge in the hoof, girl, but it won't crack; I know it won't
crack." And, "This nail is too high. It is my fault. I was gabbin' when
old Hornick drove it."

On his feet, he looked like a clothes-pin with the face of the strangest
old child. He might have been one left from the race of Dwarfs who,
tradition said, lived in the Hills before we came.

His mare was the mother of El Mahdi. I remember how Ump cried when the
colt was born, and how he sat out in the rain, a miserable drenched rat,
because his dear Bay Eagle was in the mysterious troubles of maternity,
and because she must be very unhappy at being on the north side of the
hill among the black hawthorn bushes, for that was a bad sign--the worst
sign in the world--showing the devil would have his day with the colt
now and then.

I used, when I was little, to hear talk once in a while of some very
wonderful person whom men called a "genius," and of what it was to be a
genius. The word puzzled me a good deal, because I could not understand
what was meant when it was explained to me. I used to ponder over it,
and hope that some day I might see one, which would be quite as
wonderful, I had no doubt, as seeing the man out of the moon. Then, when
El Mahdi came into his horse estate and our lives began to run together,
I w