Mancha! Why, confound it, he would have spoiled the story!"

Firio was a solid grain, to take Jack's view, winnowed out of bushels of
aboriginal chaff; an Indian, all Indian, without any strain of Spanish
blood in the primitive southern strain.

"And Firio rides Wrath of God," Jack continued, nodding to a pony with a
low-hung head and pendant lip, whose lugubrious expression was
exaggerated by a scar. "He looks it, don't you think?--always miserable,
whether his nose is in the oats or we run out of water. He is our sad
philosopher, who has just as dependable a gait as P.D. I have many
theories about the psychology of his ego. Sometimes I explain it by a
desire both to escape and to pursue unhappiness, which amounts to a
solemn kind of perpetual motion. But he has a positively sweet nature.
There is no more malice in his professional mournfulness than in the
cheerful humor of Jag Ear."

"It is plain to see which is Jag Ear," she observed, "and how he earned
his name."

Every time a burro gets into the corn, an Indian master cuts off a bit
of long, furry ear as a lesson. Before Jag Ear passed into kindlier
hands he had been clipped closer than a Boston terrier. Only a single
upstanding fragment remained in token of a graded education which had
availed him nothing.

"There's no curtailing Jag Ear's curiosity," said Jack. "To him,
everything is worth trying. That is why he is a born traveller. He
has been with me from Colorado to Chihuahua, on all my wanderings
back and forth."