ack of the
stallion, Connor looked at David. The master was in a silent agony, and
the hand of Connor fell away from the horse. He was afraid.

"I can't do it," he said frankly.

"Jump on his back," urged David bitterly. "He's no more to you than a
yearling to the hands of Abraham."

Connor realized now how far he had gone; he set about retracing the
wrong steps.

"It may appear that way, but I can't trust myself on his back. You
understand?"

He stepped back with a gesture that sent Glani bounding away.

"You see," went on Connor, "I never could really understand him."

The master seized with eagerness upon this gratifying suggestion.

"It is true," he said, "that you are a little afraid of Glani. That is
why none of the rest can handle him."

He stopped in the midst of his self-congratulation and directed at
Connor one of those glances which the gambler could never learn to meet.

"Also," said David, "you make me happy. If you had sat on his back I
should have felt your weight on my own shoulders and spirit."

He laid a hand on Connor's shoulder, but the gambler had won and lost
too often with an impenetrable face to quail now. He even managed to
smile.

"Hearken," said David. "My masters taught me many things, and everything
they taught me must be true, for they were only voices of a mind out of
another world. Yet, in spite of them," he went on kindly, "I begin to
feel a kinship with you, Benjamin. Come, we will walk and talk together
in the cool of the morning. Glani!"

The gray had wandered off to nibble at the turf; he whirled and came
like a thrown lance.

"Glani," said David, "is usually the only living thing that walks with
me in the morning; but now, my friend, we are three."

_CHAPTER FIFTEEN_

In the mid-afternoon of that day Connor rested in his room, and David
rested in the lake, floating with only his nose and lips out of water.
Toward the center of the lake even the surface held the chill of the
snows, but David floated in the warm shallows and looked up to the sky
through a film of water. The tiny ripples became immense air waves that
rushed from mountain to mountain, dashed the clouds up and down, and
then left the heavens placid and windless.

He grew weary of this placidity, and as he turned upon one side he heard
a prolonged hiss from the shore. David rolled with the speed of a water
moccasin and headed in with his arm flashing in a powerful stroke that
presently brough