nd
love each other; but lovers know that each understands the other by one
note or inflection of the voice, by one little act of tenderness. These,
or one of these, tell the whole story, the everlasting truth by
which men and women learn how good at its worst life is, or speak the
lightning-lie by which the bones of a dead world are exposed to the
disillusioned soul.

This had been a great day, because, in it, physical being had joyously
celebrated itself in a wild business of the hills; in air so fresh and
sweet that it almost sparkled to the eye; in a sun that was hot, but did
not punish; at a sport by which the earliest men in the earliest age
of the world made life a rare sensation. The man who has not chased the
wild pony in the hills with the lasso on his arm, riding, as they say in
the West, "Hell for leather," down the steep hillside, over the rock and
the rough land, balancing on his broncho with the dexterity of a bird or
a baboon, has failed to find one of life's supreme pleasures.

In the foothills, many miles away from Slow Down Ranch and Tralee, there
lived a herd of wild ponies, and it had been the ambition of a dozen
ranchmen and broncho-busters thereabouts to capture one or many. More
than once Orlando had seen a little gray broncho, with legs like the
wrists of a lady, with a tail like a comet, frisking among the rocks
and the brushwood, or standing alert, moveless and alone upon some
promontory, and he had made up his mind that if, and when, there came
a day of broncho-busting, he would become a hunter of the little
gray mare. When the news came that the ranchmen for miles around were
preparing for the drive of the hills, he determined to take part in it,
against the commands of the Young Doctor, who said that he would run
risk in doing so, for, though his wound was healed, he should still
avoid strain and fatigue.

There is no fatigue like that of broncho-busting. It is not galloping on
the turf; it is being shaken and tossed in a saddle which the knees can
never grip, on the back of something gone mad--for the maddest, wisest,
carefullest thing on earth is a broncho, which itself was once a wild
pony of the hills, and has been hunted down, thrown by the lasso,
saddled, bridled and heart-broken all in an hour. When the broncho
which was once a wild pony sets out on the chase after its own, there is
nothing like it in the world; and so Orlando found.

The veteran broncho-busters and ranchmen gave