Page:The man on horseback (IA manonhorseback00abdurich).pdf/17

 a great, shimmering silver horn the morning mist swung out of the valley and Tom Graves swung along with it, sitting his tough, sinewy, thirteen-hand pony as easily as a lifetime of it can teach a man, and lifting the mare gently with knee and soft word and knowing hand when ruts or slippery timber falls clef the road or when it dipped too suddenly into rock-strewn levels.

Fourteen miles beyond, an hour and a half's ride if the pony was as keen as the man, was Woodfell, a one-horse, one-man homestead of drab, slat-built house, splintering, zig-zag fence, rickety corral, and a brown, hopeless blotch of illy tilled fields. There he would stable his horse with "Swede" Johnson, the squatter, pay more or less gracefully that flaxen-haired individual's habitual overcharge for a meal consisting of bread mixed in the flour bag and baked in the frying-pan, inky, boiled coffee, stringy bacon that tasted of fish, and rice pudding remarkable for its shortcomings as to raisins, and resume his journey on foot into the Hoodoo mining district. Tom Graves was easily moved to laughter. He