e stable, but he found no relief there. He returned to the corral, and
began slowly to circle inside the fence, but neither did this relieve
him. Finally he took up his old stand in the sunlit corner, where he
fell to listening with ears and eyes attentive to least sounds. But even
this did not relieve him.

Nor would anything ever relieve him. Never would he find absolute solace
from his inner disquiet. For what he sought and could not find, what he
listened for and could not hear, was another of those sounds which had
relieved the tedium of his brief stay in the mountains, the friendly
nicker of the aged mare, gone to toil out her life in the racking
treadmill between town and mountain.

CHAPTER XI

LOVE REJECTED

Pat had just been clipped. And never was there a horse nearer
perfection! Shorn of all hair, his splendid physique, now in fullest
maturity, stood out clean-cut and fascinating.

In weight he might have tipped the scales at ten hundred pounds. In
color his skin, which now showed clearly, was a shade darker than that
of the elephant, but it showed the richness of velvet. His body through
the trunk was round and symmetrical; his haunches were wide without
projection of the hip-bones; and his limbs, the stifle and lower thigh,
were long and strong and fully developed. Added to these, he was high in
the withers, the line of back and neck curving perfectly; his shoulders
were deep and oblique; and his long, thick fore arm, knotty with bulging
sinews, told of powerful muscles. And finally, his knees across the pan
were wide, the cannon-bone below thin and short, the pasterns long and
sloping, and the hoofs round and dark and neatly set on. While over
all--over the small, bony head, beautiful neck and shoulders--over the
entire body, clear down to the hoofs--ran a network of veins like those
on the back of a leaf, only more irregular--veins which stood out as
though the skin were but thin parchment through which the blood might
burst. A rare horse, rare in any country, doubly rare in this land of
the small Spanish product, was the rating given to Pat by men trained to
judge value at sight. And so widespread did this appraisal become, along
trail, beside camp-fire, in bunk-house, that it was known throughout the
length and breadth of the Territory, and beyond the Territory, that
Judge Richards was the owner of a horse the like of which never had been
seen south of the Pecos.

For several days after th