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A rich blood-bay in color, with flowing black mane and tail, as he swept around in the various changes with wide, glowing nostrils and flecked with foam, in my eyes he came well up to the description of the warhorse whose "neck was clothed with thunder."
A man on a tall gray, with the legs of speed and plenty of girth at the cinches, where girth means lung power, twisted out of a side trail and swung past El Sangre at a fast gallop. The blood-bay snorted and came hard against the bit in a desire to follow. On the range, when he led his wild band, no horse had ever passed El Sangre and hardly the voice of the master could keep him back now.
The blood-bay went like the wind, passing up-jutting boulders with a swish of gravel knocked from his plunging hoofs against the rock.
He must have used the "Rat's-Hole" for egress; he hurried down the green slope, calling his daughter by name. All this Constans saw in that swift backward glance. Well, there was but one thing that he could do. And Night knew it, too; brave little Night, how cleverly you forced yourself under the towering bulk of that brute of a blood-bay!
He drew El Sangre to a halt with a word. The great stallion turned his head as he paused and looked back to his master with a confiding eye as though waiting willingly for directions. And all at once the heart of Terence went out to the blood-bay as it had never gone before to any creature, dumb or human. For El Sangre had known such pain as he himself was learning at this moment.
As he reached the nether lip of Murphy's Pass a small cavalcade detached itself from the main mass before Captain Lorrimer's saloon and swept down the street, first a dusty figure on a dusty horse, hardly visible; then a spot of red which must be Harry Fisher on his blood-bay, with a long-striding sorrel beside him that could carry no one except grim old Sliver Waldron.
There was no one in actual sight save he who sat upon his blood-bay steed, girth deep in the Ochre brook under shadow of the alders. Only one, but that one! Constans found himself in the court-yard; how he scarcely knew. The water gate still stood open with the drawbridge lowered, but both could be easily secured within a few seconds should the enemy venture upon any open demonstration.
Without a word Fuscus leaped from the back of the fine blood-bay barb he bestrode, and beckoning to a confidential slave who followed him, "Here," he said, "Geta, take Nanthus, and ride straightway up the Minervium to the house of Arvina; thou knowest it, beside the Alban Mansions, and do as he shall command you. Tell him, my Paullus."
Round the corner of the house shot a blood-bay stallion, red as the red of iron under the blacksmith's hammer, with a long, black tail snapping and flaunting behind him, his ears flattened, his beautiful vicious head outstretched in an effort to tug the reins out of the hands of the rider.
Not an unpleasing picture as he sat there in the sunshine astride the big blood-bay, but Constans, looking upon him, knew that neither now nor hereafter could there be any verity of peace between them. There is such a thing as hate at first sight even as there is love.
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