ounds, leadin' even the master, for Lory could no
more hold him than his own glee at the grand way they were takin' gates
and walls. But suddenly that bay divil's-spawn swerves from the
course, dashes up and stops bang broadside against a barn; and there,
with ears laid back tight to his head and muzzle half upturned, for
four mortal hours the bay held Lory's off leg jammed so tight against
the barn that, rowel and crop-cut hard as he might, the only thing Lory
was able to free was such a flow of language, it was a holy wonder
Providence didn't fire the barn and burn up the pair of them.

"And as Jack passed them I heard the divil sing not [Transcriber's
note: out?]: 'Ha! Ha! Lory! it was the gray mare wanted to jump but
couldn't, and it's the bay can jump but won't! It's an "oh hell!" for
you and a "ha! ha!" for me this time!'

"Which, while they're still fast friends, was the last word ever passed
between them on the subject of the funker and the balker."

CHAPTER XII

EL TIGRE

"A cat may look at a king, but the son of a village lawyer may not
venture to bare his heart to the daughter of the Duque de la Torrevieja.
And yet a man of our blood was ennobled early in the wars with the Moors,
while the Duke's forebears were still simple men-at-arms, knighted under
a name that in itself carries the ring of the heroic deeds that earned
it."

The speaker, Mauro de la Lucha-sangre (literally "Mauro of the Bloody
Battle"), stood one June morning of 1874 beneath the shade of a gnarled
olive-tree on the banks of the Guadaira River, rebelliously stamping a
heel into the soft turf. Son of the foremost lawyer of his native town
of Utrera, educated in Sevilla at the best university of his province,
already at twenty-four himself a fully accredited _licenciado_, Mauro's
future held actually brilliant prospects for a man of the station into
which he was born. And yet, most envied of his classmates though he was,
to Mauro himself the future loomed black, forbidding, cheerless.

Mauro's father, by legacy from his father, was the attorney and
counsellor of the Duque de la Torrevieja; and so might Mauro have been
for the next Duke had there not cropped out in him the daring, the love
of adventure, the pride, and the confidence that had lifted the first
Lucha-sangre above his fellows. It was a case of breeding back--away
back over and past generations of fawning commoners to the times when
Lucha-sangre swords were spli