the eye in the sale-ring at Newmarket and held
its own between the flags. And piquancy was added by the fact, recorded
in the Kentucky stud-book, that the dam traced her origin direct to
Iroquois who in the Derby of 1881 had lowered the English colours to the
dust.

Again there was no doubt that the mare had been born in a yellow-pine
shack in the Cumberlands, on an old homestead--made familiar to millions
in both continents by the picture papers--known as Blue Mounds, and
owned by a Quaker farmer who was himself the great-grandson of a pioneer
Friend, who in the last years of the eighteenth century had crossed the
mountains with his family and flocks, like Abraham of old, and had won
for himself this clearing from the primeval forest, driving farther west
its ancient denizens.

So much, not even the arrogant English dared to dispute.

But the rest was mystery. It was said that Jaggers himself did not know
who was Mocassin's sire; and that Ikey and Chukkers, the only two who
did, were so close that they never let on even to each other. True the
English, with characteristic bluff, when they discovered that they had
found their mistress in the mare, took it for granted that her sire was
an imported English horse and even named him. But Ikey and Chukkers both
denied the importation with emphasis.

Then there were those who traced her origin to a horse from the Bombay
Arab stables. These swore they could detect the Prophet's Thumb on the
mare's auburn neck. The Waler School had many backers; and there were
even a few cranks who suggested for the place of honour a curly-eared
Kathiawar horse. But the All-American School, dominant in the States and
Southern Republic, maintained with truculence that a Spanish stallion
from the Pampas was the only sire for God Almighty's Mustang. The wild
horse theory, as it was called, appealed to popular sentiment, however
remote from the fact, and helped to build the legend of the mare. And in
support of the theory, it must be said that Mocassin, in spite of her
lovableness, had in her more of the jaguar than of the domestic cat,
grown indolent, selfish, and fat through centuries of security and
sleep.

"Wild as the wildman and sweet as the briar-rose," was the saying they
had about her in the homestead where she was bred.

* * * * *

Ikey got into his car and rolled away through the dust toward Brighton.

The other three men strolled back to the yard.