Quite by chance, on the way back, meeting Mendenhall, the horse manager, they were deflected by him to a wide pasture, broken by wooded canyons and studded with oaks, to look over a herd of yearling Shires that was to be dispatched next morning to the upland pastures and feeding sheds of the Miramar Hills. There were nearly two hundred of them, rough-coated, beginning to shed, large-boned and large for their age.
«We don't exactly crowd them,» Dick Forrest explained, «but Mr. Mendenhall sees to it that they never lack full nutrition from the time they are foaled. Up there in the hills, where they are going, they'll balance their grass with grain. This makes them assemble every night at the feeding places and enables the feeders to keep track of them with a minimum of effort. I've shipped fifty stallions, two-year– olds, every year for the past five years, to Oregon alone. They're sort of standardized, you know. The people up there know what they're getting. They know my standard so well that they'll buy unsight and unseen.»
«You must cull a lot, then,» Graham ventured.
«And you'll see the culls draying on the streets of San Francisco,»
Dick answered.
«Yes, and on the streets of Denver,» Mr. Mendenhall amplified, «and of Los Angeles, and—why, two years ago, in the horse-famine, we shipped twenty carloads of four-year geldings to Chicago, that averaged seventeen hundred each. The lightest were sixteen, and there were matched pairs up to nineteen hundred. Lord, Lord, that was a year for horse-prices—blue sky, and then some.»
As Mr. Mendenhall rode away, a man, on a slender-legged, head-tossing
Palomina, rode up to them and was introduced to Graham as Mr.
Hennessy, the ranch veterinary.
«I heard Mrs. Forrest was looking over the colts,» he explained to his employer, «and I rode across to give her a glance at The Fawn here. She'll be riding her in less than a week. What horse is she on to-day?»
«The Fop,» Dick replied, as if expecting the comment that was prompt as the disapproving shake of Mr. Hennessy's head.
«I can never become converted to women riding stallions,» muttered the veterinary. «The Fop is dangerous. Worse—though I take my hat off to his record—he's malicious and vicious. She—Mrs. Forrest ought to ride him with a muzzle—but he's a striker as well, and I don't see how she can put cushions on his hoofs.»
«Oh, well,» Dick placated, «she has a bit that
«If he doesn't fall over on her some day,» Mr. Hennessy grumbled. «Anyway, I'll breathe easier when she takes to The Fawn here. Now
«Let's ride over,» Dick suggested. «Mrs. Forrest'll have a gay handful in The Fop if she's ridden him into that bunch of younglings.—It's her territory, you know,» he elucidated to Graham. «All the house horses and lighter stock is her affair. And she gets grand results. I can't understand it, myself. It's like a little girl straying into an experimental laboratory of high explosives and mixing the stuff around any old way and getting more powerful combinations than the graybeard chemists.»
The three men took a cross-ranch road for half a mile, turned up a wooded canyon where ran a spring-trickle of stream, and emerged on a wide rolling terrace rich in pasture. Graham's first glimpse was of a background of many curious yearling and two-year-old colts, against which, in the middleground, he saw his hostess, on the back of the bright bay thoroughbred, The Fop, who, on hind legs, was striking his forefeet in the air and squealing shrilly. They reined in their mounts and watched.
«He'll get her yet,» the veterinary muttered morosely. «That Fop isn't safe.»
But at that moment Paula Forrest, unaware of her audience, with a sharp cry of command and a cavalier thrust of sharp spurs into The Fop's silken sides, checked him down to four-footedness on the ground and a restless, champing quietness.
«Taking chances?» Dick mildly reproached her, as the three rode up.
«Oh, I can manage him,» she breathed between tight teeth, as, with ears back and vicious-gleaming eyes, The Fop bared his teeth in a bite that would have been perilously near to Graham's leg had she not reined the brute abruptly away across the neck and driven both spurs solidly into his sides.
The Fop quivered, squealed, and for the moment stood still.
«It's the old game, the white man's game,» Dick laughed. «She's not afraid of him, and he knows it. She outgames him, out-savages him, teaches him what savagery is in its intimate mood and tense.»
Three times, while they looked on, ready to whirl their own steeds away if he got out of hand, The Fop attempted to burst into rampage, and three times, solidly, with careful, delicate hand on the bitter bit, Paula Forrest dealt him double spurs in the ribs, till he stood, sweating, frothing, fretting, beaten, and in hand.
«It's the way the white man has always done,» Dick moralized, while Graham suffered a fluttery, shivery sensation of admiration of the beast-conquering Little Lady. «He's out-savaged the savage the world around,» Dick went on. «He's out-endured him, out-filthed him, out– scalped him, out-tortured him, out-eaten him—yes, out-eaten him. It's a fair wager that the white man, in extremis, has eaten more of the genus homo, than the savage, in extremis, has eaten.»
«Good afternoon,» Paula greeted her guest, the ranch veterinary, and
her husband. «I think I've got him now. Let's look over the colts.
Just keep an eye, Mr. Graham, on his mouth. He's a dreadful snapper.
Ride free from him, and you'll save your leg for old age.»
Now that The Fop's demonstration was over, the colts, startled into flight by some impish spirit amongst them, galloped and frisked away over the green turf, until, curious again, they circled back, halted at gaze, and then, led by one particularly saucy chestnut filly, drew up in half a circle before the riders, with alert pricking ears.
Graham scarcely saw the colts at first. He was seeing his protean hostess in a new role. Would her proteanness never end? he wondered, as he glanced over the magnificent, sweating, mastered creature she bestrode. Mountain Lad, despite his hugeness, was a mild-mannered pet beside this squealing, biting, striking Fop who advertised all the spirited viciousness of the most spirited vicious thoroughbred.
«Look at her,» Paula whispered to Dick, in order not to alarm the saucy chestnut filly. «Isn't she wonderful! That's what I've been working for.» Paula turned to Evan. «Always they have some fault, some miss, at the best an approximation rather than an achievement. But she's an achievement. Look at her. She's as near right as I shall probably ever get. Her sire is Big Chief, if you know our racing register. He sold for sixty thousand when he was a cripple. We borrowed the use of him. She was his only get of the season. But look at her! She's got his chest and lungs. I had my choices—mares eligible for the register. Her dam wasn't eligible, but I chose her. She was an obstinate old maid, but she was the one mare for Big Chief. This is her first foal and she was eighteen years old when she bred. But I knew it was there. All I had to do was to look at Big Chief and her, and it just had to be there.»
«The dam was only half thoroughbred,» Dick explained.
«But with a lot of Morgan on the other side,» Paula added instantly, «and a streak along the back of mustang. This shall be called Nymph, even if she has no place in the books. She'll be my first unimpeachable perfect saddle horse—I know it—the kind I like—my dream come true at last.»
«A hoss has four legs, one on each corner,» Mr. Hennessy uttered profoundly.
«And from five to seven gaits,» Graham took up lightly,
«And yet I don't care for those many-gaited Kentuckians,» Paula said quickly, «—except for park work. But for California, rough roads, mountain trails, and all the rest, give me the fast walk, the fox trot, the long trot that covers the ground, and the not too-long, ground-covering gallop. Of course, the close-coupled, easy canter; but I scarcely call that a gait—it's no more than the long lope reduced to the adjustment of wind or rough ground.»
«She's a beauty,» Dick admired, his eyes warm in contemplation of the saucy chestnut filly, who was daringly close and alertly sniffing of the subdued Fop's tremulous and nostril-dilated muzzle.
«I prefer my own horses to be near thoroughbred rather than all thoroughbred,» Paula proclaimed. «The
