which, after its first flight, seemed gentle enough, and secured the
end of the twenty-foot lariat that dragged after him in the grass.
It required him but a few moments to contrive the rope into an
ingenious nose-bridle, after the style of the Mexican _borsal_. In
another he was upon the horse's back and off at a splendid lope,
giving the animal free choice of direction. "He will take me
somewhere," said Chicken to himself.

It would have been a thing of joy, that untrammelled gallop over the
moonlit prairie, even to Chicken, who loathed exertion, but that his
mood was not for it. His head ached; a growing thirst was upon him;
the "somewhere" whither his lucky mount might convey him was full of
dismal peradventure.

And now he noted that the horse moved to a definite goal. Where the
prairie lay smooth he kept his course straight as an arrow's toward
the east. Deflected by hill or arroyo or impractical spinous brakes,
he quickly flowed again into the current, charted by his unerring
instinct. At last, upon the side of a gentle rise, he suddenly
subsided to a complacent walk. A stone's cast away stood a little
mott of coma trees; beneath it a _jacal_ such as the Mexicans
erect--a one-room house of upright poles daubed with clay and roofed
with grass or tule reeds. An experienced eye would have estimated
the spot as the headquarters of a small sheep ranch. In the
moonlight the ground in the nearby corral showed pulverized to
a level smoothness by the hoofs of the sheep. Everywhere was
carelessly distributed the paraphernalia of the place--ropes,
bridles, saddles, sheep pelts, wool sacks, feed troughs, and camp
litter. The barrel of drinking water stood in the end of the
two-horse wagon near the door. The harness was piled, promiscuous,