les. Such
he would not knowingly harm. A long memory had the roan.

Toward his own kind Blue Blazes bore himself defiantly. Double harness
was something he loathed. One was not free to work his will on the
despised driver if hampered by a pole and mate. In such cases he nipped
manes and kicked under the traces until released. He had a special
antipathy for gray horses and fought them on the smallest provocation,
or upon none at all.

As a result Blue Blazes, while knowing no masters, had many owners,
sometimes three in a single week. He began his career by filling a three
months' engagement as a livery horse, but after he had run away a dozen
times, wrecked several carriages, and disabled a hostler, he was sold
for half his purchase price.

Then did he enter upon his wanderings in real earnest. He pulled
street-cars, delivery wagons, drays and ash-carts. He was sold to
unsuspecting farmers, who, when his evil traits cropped out, swapped him
unceremoniously and with ingenious prevarication by the roadside. In the
natural course of events he was much punished.

Up and across the southern peninsula of Michigan he drifted
contentiously, growing more vicious with each encounter, more daring
after each victory. In Muskegon he sent the driver of a grocery wagon to
the hospital with a shoulder-bite requiring cauterization and four
stitches. In Manistee he broke the small bones in the leg of a baker's
large boy. In Cadillac a boarding-stable hostler struck him with an iron
shovel. Blue Blazes kicked the hostler quite accurately and very
suddenly through a window.

Between Cadillac and Kalaska he spent several lively weeks with farmers.
Most of them tried various taming processes. Some escaped with bruises
and some suffered serious injury. At Alpena he found an owner who,
having read something very convincing in a horse-trainer's book,
elaborately strapped the roan's legs according to diagram, and then went
into the stall to wreak vengeance with a riding-whip. Blue Blazes
accepted one cut, after which he crushed the avenger against the plank
partition until three of the man's ribs were broken. The Alpena man was
fished from under the roan's hoofs just in time to save his life.

This incident earned Blue Blazes the name of "man-killer," and it stuck.
He even figured in the newspaper dispatches. "Blue Blazes, the Michigan
Man-Killer," "The Ugliest Horse Alive," "Alpena's Equine Outlaw"; these
were some of the head-lines. The