ould lie awake at night trying to study out what sort of horse it was
that deliberately walked off the high banks along the road, or pitched
me out into the deep blue-grass, or over into the sedge bushes, when it
occurred to him that life was monotonous, tumbling me upside down like a
girl, although I could stick in my brother's big saddle when the Black
Abbot was having a bad day,--and everybody knew the Black Abbot was the
worst horse in the Hills.

Wondering about it, the suggestion came that perhaps El Mahdi was a
"genius." Then I pressed the elders for further data on the word, and
studied the horse in the light of what they told me. He fitted snug to
the formula. He neither feared God, nor regarded man, so far as I could
tell. He knew how to do things without learning, and he had no
conscience. The explanation had arrived. El Mahdi was a genius. After
that we got on better; he yielded a sort of constructive obedience, and
I lorded it over him, swaggering like a king's governor. But deep down
in my youthful bosom, I knew that this obedience was only pretended, and
that he obeyed merely because he was indifferent.

He stood by while I hammered the stirrup, with his iron grey head held
high in the air, looking away over the hickory ridge across the blue
hills, to the dim wavering face of the mountains. He was almost
seventeen hands high, with deep shoulders, and flat legs trim at the
pastern as a woman's ankle, and a coat dark grey, giving one the idea of
good blue steel. He was entirely, I may say he was abominably,
indifferent, except when it came into his broad head to wipe out my
swaggering arrogance, or when he stood as now, staring at the far-off
smoky wall of the Hills, as though he hoped to find there, some day
farther on, a wonderful message awaiting him, or some friend whom he had
lost when he swam Lethe, or some ancient enemy.

I finished with the stirrup, buckled it back into its leather and
climbed into the saddle. It was one of the bitter things that my young
legs were not long enough to permit me to drive my foot deep into the
wide, wooden stirrup and swing into the saddle as Jud did with the
Cardinal, or as my brother did when the Black Abbot was in a hurry and
he was not. I explained it away, however, by pointing out, like a boy,
not that my legs were short, but that El Mahdi, the False Prophet, was a
very high horse.

Jud had not dismounted, and Ump was on the Bay Eagle like a squirrel, by
the t