ndaries the brood mares with their growing progeny lived as free and
untamed as their wild cousins on the unfenced lands about them. The
colts, except for one painful experience, when they were roped and
branded, from the day of their birth until they were ready to be broken
were never handled.

On the morning following his meeting with the stranger on the Divide
Phil Acton, with two of his cowboy helpers, rode out to the big pasture
to bring in the band.

The owner of the Cross-Triangle always declared that Phil was intimately
acquainted with every individual horse and head of stock between the
Divide and Camp Wood Mountain, and from Skull Valley to the Big Chino.
In moments of enthusiasm the Dean even maintained stoutly that his young
foreman knew as well every coyote, fox, badger, deer, antelope, mountain
lion, bobcat and wild horse that had home or hunting ground in the
country over which the lad had ridden since his babyhood. Certain it is
that "Wild Horse Phil," as he was called by admiring friends--for
reasons which you shall hear--loved this work and life to which he was
born. Every feature of that wild land, from lonely mountain peak to
hidden canyon spring, was as familiar to him as the streets and
buildings of a man's home city are well known to the one reared among
them. And as he rode that morning with his comrades to the day's work
the young man felt keenly the call of the primitive, unspoiled life that
throbbed with such vital strength about him. He could not have put that
which he felt into words; he was not even conscious of the forces that
so moved him; he only knew that he was glad.

The days of the celebration at Prescott had been enjoyable days. To meet
old friends and comrades; to ride with them in the contests that all
true men of his kind love; to compare experiences and exchange news and
gossip with widely separated neighbors--had been a pleasure. But the
curious crowds of strangers; the throngs of sightseers from the, to him,
unknown world of cities, who had regarded him as they might have viewed
some rare and little-known creature in a menagerie, and the brazen
presence of those unclean parasites and harpies that prey always upon
such occasions had oppressed and disgusted him until he was glad to
escape again to the clean freedom, the pure vitality and the unspoiled
spirit of his everyday life and environment. In an overflow of sheer
physical and spiritual energy he lifted his horse into a r