g, that bestrode the stallion when he vaulted away.

It was sunset, and a time of great wailing, when they carried Har in from
the far rocks where they found him. His head was quite broken, and like
honey from a fallen bee-tree his brains dripped on the ground. His
mother strewed wood-ashes on her head and blackened her face. His father
cut off half the fingers of one hand in token of sorrow. And all the
women, especially the young and unwedded, screamed evil names at me; and
the elders shook their wise heads and muttered and mumbled that not their
fathers nor their fathers' fathers had betrayed such a madness. Horse
meat was good to eat; young colts were tender to old teeth; and only a
fool would come to close grapples with any wild horse save when an arrow
had pierced it, or when it struggled on the stake in the midst of the
pit.

And Selpa scolded me to sleep, and in the morning woke me with her
chatter, ever declaiming against my madness, ever pronouncing her claim
upon me and the claims of our children, till in the end I grew weary, and
forsook my far vision, and said never again would I dream of bestriding
the wild horse to fly swift as its feet and the wind across the sands and
the grass lands.

And through the years the tale of my madness never ceased from being told
over the camp-fire. Yet was the very telling the source of my vengeance;
for the dream did not die, and the young ones, listening to the laugh and
the sneer, redreamed it, so that in the end it was Othar, my eldest-born,
himself a sheer stripling, that walked down a wild stallion, leapt on its
back, and flew before all of us with the speed of the wind. Thereafter,
that they might keep up with him, all men were trapping and breaking wild
horses. Many horses were broken, and some men, but I lived at the last
to the day when, at the changing of camp-sites in the pursuit of the meat
in its seasons, our very babes, in baskets of willow-withes, were slung
side and side on the backs of our horses that carried our camp-trappage
and dunnage.

I, a young man, had seen my vision, dreamed my dream; Selpa, the woman,
had held me from that far desire; but Othar, the seed of us to live
after, glimpsed my vision and won to it, so that our tribe became wealthy
in the gains of the chase.

There was a woman--on the great drift down out of Europe, a weary drift
of many generations, when we brought into India the shorthorn cattle and
the planting of barley.