im." Then the practical Canadian added, as Anne slid down and laid her
gloved hand on the steaming neck: "He's a classy-looking individual,
ain't he now? You'd never guess that I took him out of a plough, would
you?"

"Out of a plough!" echoed the girl. "Why, he's a picture horse! His
lines are almost perfect!"

The horseman nodded and grinned. "He's all of that, ma'am, but just the
same when I first saw him he was pulling a plough--or, rather, he was
trying to run away with one. Of course he must of had the breeding
somewhere way off. I reckon he's a throw-back, but if I hadn't come
along and seen him he'd still be drudging away on a rocky farm in the
hills. As it is, he's took blues and reds all through Canada and the
East--and I've a notion you're going to ride him out the gate with a
championship tie on his brow-band tonight."

As Boone turned away with Anne, the words seemed to ring in his ears:
"If I hadn't come along and seen him, he'd still be drudging away on a
rocky farm in the hills." It fitted his own case precisely, but it made
him think, too. He wondered if the time would ever come when people
would look at him in public places and find it hard to realize that his
youth had been like that magnificent show horse's colthood--a life close
to the clods.

Nothing could have kept Boone Wellver away from the Horse Show that
evening, but he went with a self-confessed trepidation hard to conceal.
In the wide, barnlike foyer of the building, a vertigo of stage fright
obsessed him. Never had he seen such a massed and bewilderingly
colourful display of evening dress, nor heard such a confused chorus of
bright laughter, light talk and blaring orchestration. In the first
dizziness of the impression he had the sense of intruding on Fashion
vaunting itself unabashed to the trumpetings of heralds, and there swept
back over him the positive pain of diffidence which he had felt that
other time, when he stood in the open doorway of Colonel Wallifarro's
house and announced that he had come to the party.

Inside, as he forced himself onward, his disquiet increased as the blaze
of colour heightened and bloomed in the flower-like tiers of the boxes.
The glistening shoulders of women in filmy gowns, the sparkle of
jewellery, the flash of silk hats and the nodding of pretty faces, all
confused him as dry land things might confuse a fish, and he felt
unintentionally impertinent when his sleeve of decent black brushed a
soft ar