Says the Sheik: "I have raised my mare from a foal, and out of love for
me she will lay down her life; but when I come out to her in the
morning, when I feed her and give her water, she still looks beyond me
and across the desert. She is waiting for the coming of a real man, she
is waiting for the coming of a true master out of the horizon!"

Marianne had known thoroughbreds since she was a child and after coming
West she had become acquainted with mere "hoss-flesh," but today for the
first time she felt that the horse is not meant by nature to be the
servant of man but that its speed is meant to ensure it sacred freedom.
A moment later she was wondering how the thought had come to her. That
glimpse of equine perfection had been an illusion built of spirit and
attitude; when the head of the stallion fell she saw the daylight truth:
that this was either the wreck of a young horse or the sad ruin of a
fine animal now grown old. He was a ragged creature with dull eyes and
pendulous lip. No comb had been among the tangles of mane and tail for
an unknown period; no brush had smoothed his coat. It was once a rich
red-chestnut, no doubt, but now it was sun-faded to the color of sand.
He was thin. The unfleshed backbone and withers stood up painfully and
she counted the ribs one by one. Yet his body was not so broken as his
spirit. His drooped head gave him the appearance of searching for a
spot to lie down. He seemed to have been left here by the cruelty of his
owner to starve and die in the white heat of this corral--a desertion
which he accepted as justice because he was useless in the world.

It affected Marianne like the resignation of a man; indeed there was
more personality in the chestnut than in many human beings. Once he had
been a beauty, and the perfection which first startled her had been a
ghost out of his past. His head, where age or famine showed least, was