ing my stock. He handled them all over, not very cleverly, nearly got himself kicked, and then trailed me up to the hotel to tell me he could throw a stone across the road and kill a horse anywhere in the Sacramento Valley that could beat mine at every point. He was rather glib with his tongue, and I had four hours to wait, so I invited him to come in and give me his ideas on horseflesh. There's a little back room in the top story, looking up a stone dump that they call a mountain. I gave him one pony of rye to start him. We sat there for six hours.
"He began by giving his experiences in horse-breaking, though from a sort of callous on his hands, and the way he handled his feet I thought he had been more accustomed to horses in front of a plow than under saddle. Then he got off on famous horses he had seen, most of which had died before he was born; and, finally, of course, he began to wind himself up on a horse he owned that could beat everything in the state of California. Just there it struck me he'd graduated from the lying stage. Something in the way he described that horse—those particulars that a man can't invent—made me think it wasn't a piece of imagination. He built up a stock farm around it in a few
minutes, but it was easy to see that the real
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