"Let's ride over," Dick suggested. "Mrs. Forrest'll have a gay handful
in The Fop if she's ridden him into that bunch of younglings.--It's
her territory, you know," he elucidated to Graham. "All the house
horses and lighter stock is her affair. And she gets grand results. I
can't understand it, myself. It's like a little girl straying into an
experimental laboratory of high explosives and mixing the stuff around
any old way and getting more powerful combinations than the graybeard
chemists."

The three men took a cross-ranch road for half a mile, turned up a
wooded canyon where ran a spring-trickle of stream, and emerged on a
wide rolling terrace rich in pasture. Graham's first glimpse was of a
background of many curious yearling and two-year-old colts, against
which, in the middleground, he saw his hostess, on the back of the
bright bay thoroughbred, The Fop, who, on hind legs, was striking his
forefeet in the air and squealing shrilly. They reined in their mounts
and watched.

"He'll get her yet," the veterinary muttered morosely. "That Fop isn't
safe."

But at that moment Paula Forrest, unaware of her audience, with a
sharp cry of command and a cavalier thrust of sharp spurs into The
Fop's silken sides, checked him down to four-footedness on the ground
and a restless, champing quietness.

"Taking chances?" Dick mildly reproached her, as the three rode up.

"Oh, I can manage him," she breathed between tight teeth, as, with
ears back and vicious-gleaming eyes, The Fop bared his teeth in a bite