Bred of the Desert: A Horse and a Romance

The third group in the affray consisted of cowboys. Weary and bedraggled, yet joyous at the suppression of the uprising, they set out for home about noon. Stephen, mounted upon...

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 ric...

There was water in the grove, and the men made camp at the edge of the trees. "The Doc," which was what the rangers early had affectionately nicknamed Stephen, was suffering a c...

Meantime Pat was running at top speed across the desert. Yet he was trying to understand this strange call to duty. Roused from fitful slumber by trampling hoofs, he had felt an...

Helen spent much time in the society of the horse. Aside from attending to his wants, such as food and water, she more than once took comb and brush in hand and gave him a thoro...

Next morning Pat, imprisoned in a tiny stable, tried to get out by thrusting his head against the door. But the door would not give. Alone in semi-darkness, therefore, he spent...

frantically. His efforts carried him all over the trail, and once dangerously near the edge and the turbulent waters below. But he found himself unable to throw off the weight.

Stephen awoke quite late in the morning after his arrival in Pat's home town. Standing before a window in his room at the hotel, he saw a young woman cantering across the railro...

It was high noon in the desert, but there was no dazzling sunlight. Over the earth hung a twilight, a yellow-pink softness that flushed across the sky like the approach of a sha...

Meantime, Helen was becoming desperate over her loss. Unwilling to accept the theory of her household, which was that Pat had been stolen by a band of organized thieves and ere...

Pat waited in vain two whole days. Not once did she come to him, not once did he lay eyes upon her. He became nervous and irritable, and in this emptiness, equal to that which h...

A week passed before Pat knew of his change in masters. But that was not strange. Busily engaged in keeping himself alive on scant herbage, he took but little interest in anythi...

With the beginning of the forward movement across the railroad the colt, ears cocked and eyes alert, moved across also. Close about him stepped other horses, and over and around...

As the weeks passed, each day bringing its period of companionship, this friendship and understanding between them became perfect in its simplicity. Pat learned to know her wish...

It was well along in the morning when Felipe pulled up next day before his little adobe house in the mountain settlement. The journey from the mesa below had been, perforce, slo...

The next morning Pat had a change from the tedium of the desert. With the others he struck into a narrow canyon that led out to a beaten trail upon a rolling mesa. The trail wou...

A rifle-shot forced instant action. Jim whirled away from the camp-fire and saddle-bags and sprang toward the horses, while Johnson, leaping up with the agile twist of an athlet...

It was late afternoon when Helen came down from her room. She had regained her calm. The Judge had gone about his affairs, her aunt was deep in her siesta, the Mexican woman was...

The interior of the shack was comparatively bare. On the floor, which was of adobe, and therefore hard and smooth as cement, were five three-legged stools and a table, all crude...

Pat's mistress was gone. He realized it from his continued disappointed watching for her at the fence; he realized it from the utter absence out of life of the sweets he had lea...

Next morning, having returned from the timber-slopes, Felipe, fresh and radiant, appeared outside the corral in holiday attire. Part of this attire was a pair of brand-new overa...

After long jogging behind the ranch wagon Pat found himself back in a stable. He found himself attended once more by the round-faced and smiling young man who had looked after h...

Pat well knew that this new experience was a strange thing. The trip with the hostler, the unusual hour of day, the appearance of his mistress's friend, the stranger out of the...

A hundred miles west from the shack, stretching away from it in an almost unbroken expanse, was a desert within the desert. _Amole_ and sagebrush and cactus vied with each other...