The west wind came over the Eagles, gathered purity
from the evergreen slopes of the mountains, blew across
the foothills and league wide fields, and came at
length to the stallion with a touch of coolness and
enchanting scents of far-off things. Just as his
head went up, just as the breeze lifted mane and tail,
Marianne Jordan halted her pony and drew in her breath
with pleasure. For she had caught from the chestnut
in the corral one flash of perfection and those far-seeing
eyes called to mind the Arab belief.
Says the Sheik: “I have raised my mare
from a foal, and out of love for me she will lay down
her life; but when I come out to her in the morning,
when I feed her and give her water, she still looks
beyond me and across the desert. She is waiting
for the coming of a real man, she is waiting for the
coming of a true master out of the horizon!”
Marianne had known thoroughbreds since she was a child
and after coming West she had become acquainted with
mere “hoss-flesh,” but today for the first
time she felt that the horse is not meant by nature
to be the servant of man but that its speed is meant
to ensure it sacred freedom. A moment later she
was wondering how the thought had come to her.
That glimpse of equine perfection had been an illusion
built of spirit and attitude; when the head of the
stallion fell she saw the daylight truth: that
this was either the wreck of a young horse or the sad
ruin of a fine animal now grown old. He was a
ragged creature with dull eyes and pendulous lip.
No comb had been among the tangles of mane and tail
for an unknown period; no brush had smoothed his coat.
It was once a rich red-chestnut, no doubt, but now
it was sun-faded to the color of sand. He was
thin. The unfleshed backbone and withers stood
up painfully and she counted the ribs one by one.
Yet his body was not so broken as his spirit.
His drooped head gave him the appearance of searching
for a spot to lie down. He seemed to have been
left here by the cruelty of his owner to starve and
die in the white heat of this corral—a desertion
which he accepted as justice because he was useless
in the world.
It affected Marianne like the resignation of a man;
indeed there was more personality in the chestnut
than in many human beings. Once he had been a
beauty, and the perfection which first startled her
had been a ghost out of his past. His head, where
age or famine showed least, was still unquestionably
fine. The ears were short and delicately made,
the eyes well-placed, the distance to the angle of
the jaw long—in brief, it was that short
head of small volume and large brain space which speaks
most eloquently of hot blood. As her expert eye
ran over the rest of the body she sighed to think
that such a creature had come to such an end.
There was about him no sign of life save the twitch
of his skin to shake off flies.
