CHAPTER V

RETRIBUTION

Coles had advertised the auction sale of the mares to take place
immediately after the race and though he would gladly have postponed it
he had to live up to his advertisement. Naturally the result was
disastrous. The ranchers had seen the ragged Alcatraz win against the
imported horses and they felt they could only show their local
patriotism by failing to bid. There were one or two mocking offers of a
hundred dollars a head for the lot. "Something pretty for my girl to
ride," as one of the ranchers phrased it, laughing. The result was that
every one of the mares was knocked down to Marianne at a ludicrously
low price; so low that when it was over and Coles strolled about with
her to indicate the size of her bargain she felt that she was moving in
a dream.

"It's easy to see that you're not Western," he said in the end, "but you
have a Western horse to thank for putting this deal through--I mean
Alcatraz."

"He's too ugly for that," said Marianne, and yet on her way back to the
hotel she realized that the sun-faded chestnut had truly proved a gold
mine to her. It had been, she felt, the luckiest day of her business
life, for she knew that the price she had paid for the mares was less
than half a reasonable valuation of them. Here was her ranch ready
stocked, so to speak, with fine horses. It only needed, now, to end the
tyrannical sway of Lew Hervey and in that fighting man of men, Red
Perris, Marianne felt that the solution lay.