“_Si, señorita_,” said he. “_Es verdad!_”
“Shore it’s the truth!” broke out a freckled youth of seventeen, the soft beard just showing on his cheeks. But then, as he later confessed, he plumb bogged down. And the youngest of them all—Cinquo Centavas, they called him, since he had but five copper pennies when he rode in, twelve years of age; he was now fourteen—stood with his blue eyes wet with tears, unashamed in his rags.
“Give me time to think, men!” said Anastasie Lockhart, immeasurably touched by all this. “Let me see. Wait—I don’t know!”
She rose and went to the door, framed once more gloriously against the sun; and sixteen pairs of eyes of silent men went with her.
A sudden baying of the ranch pack of foxhounds arose. It was not directed toward her. The dogs were streaming toward the pole gate of the yard fence. A rider was coming in.
IT WAS not the custom of the young mistress of Del Sol to ride out to meet strangers at her gate. She received callers in her own rude office or her almost ruder parlor. To meet any caller on this morning was distasteful to her every thought. She gave the incomer only a glance as she walked to her horse, which stood, head drooping, anchored by the long bridle reins thrown down.
A peculiar animal, Taisie’s favorite mount, so marked as to be distinguished anywhere. No doubt descended from Blanco, the great white wild horse whose menada ran on the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos, Blancocito’s dam must have been a buckskin, for he himself was a dark claybank, with the coveted black stripe along his back. But Blanco—said by some range men to be not many removes from Arabian, though of unknown origin—had given his son a white face, four white stockings and a singular harnesslike stripe of clean white, four inches wide, across both hips, running down almost to the white stockings of the hind legs. He could be told a mile away. It would have been of no use to steal him, and his shoulder brand was but perfunctory. Jim Nabours and most of the hands scoffed at any pinto, and selected solid colors—any color so only it was not black; but Blancocito put all their horsely wisdom to shame. He never tired and never quit. No trail was too long for him. Gentled when a three, he never wholly had surrendered even to Taisie or the best of Taisie’s top riders his inalienable Texas right to life, liberty and the pursuit of pitching, though these tendencies he usually held in abeyance in the case of his mistress. When he liked, he could be “mean to set,” according to some others.