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The only thing romantic and er literary about Bob McGraw was his Roman-nosed mustang, Friar Tuck so called because he had been foaled and raised on a wooded range near Sherwood in Mendocino county. As a product of Sherwood forest, Mr. McGraw had very properly christened him Friar Tuck, and as Friar Tuck's colthood home lay five hundred miles to the north, it will be seen that Mr.
Trotting, prancing, and snorting as they came down the lane, they settled down once they were in the stable lot. Davy was between two fires. He sought a safe place from being run down by the drove and yet he wanted to catch a glimpse of any kind of horse suitable to his size. He noted plenty of small ones but their short, bushy tails revealed colthood. The others were too large.
A place on the road where the French had surged up from Killala and met and fought with the English, was pointed out to me. "Here they were defeated, thim French." We passed the place where lived from colthood to glory the celebrated white horse of Mayo, the "Girraun Bawn." This horse, a racer, "bate" all Ireland in his day, and was ridden without a saddle or bridle.
The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and color of heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by harness and drudgery from colthood though if all had their rights, he ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of some Eastern plain instead of tugging here had trodden this road almost daily for twenty years.
Bud was the youngest of the hands, but a lad born to the saddle and rope. "Weak head and strong back for a horse-fighter" is a proverb on the plains, and Bud had certainly acted the part. Fresno and Show Low, with four flankers, had driven into the corral a half-dozen horses untouched by man's hands since the days of colthood.
Accustomed to this from the time when they first emerged from colthood into horsehood, the aged steeds, like many aged senators of their day, were determined enemies to any thing like innovation on the long established customs of their caste; and although, unlike the said senators, they were made to bear all the burdens of the state, still did they not suffer themselves to be driven out of the sluggish habits in which sluggish animals, of every description, seem to feel themselves privileged to indulge.
Under the weight the stallion shrank catwise, aside and down. But there was no wrench of a curb in his mouth, no biting of the cinches. In the old days of his colthood, a barelegged boy used to come into the pasture and jump on his bare back. His mind flashed back to that the bare, brown legs. That was before he had learned that men ride with leather and steel.
"I thought perhaps you would rather have the money than the colt; but I tell you what, I hain't got money enough to put into that bird, and don't you talk selling to any one till we see her gait hitched up. But I guess a little of the plow won't hurt for a few weeks or so." Next day Lisette left behind her forever the free, happy days of colthood.
The naturally docile filly responded to the voice she had heard from earliest colthood and soon let Elizabeth approach close enough to put her hand on the bit. The seriousness of the affair gave way to the comic when the horse began to snatch bits of grass from the roadside. The young couple laughed and looked at each other rather sheepishly as they saw that further cooperation was not needed.
As Peggy bent over the beautiful dying mare's head, tears streaming from her eyes, for she had cared for her and loved her since colthood, the little foal gave a low nicker and coming up behind the girl, thrust his soft muzzle over her shoulder and nestled his head against her face, trembling and quivering with a terror he could not understand.
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