These, or
one of these, tell the whole story, the everlasting truth by which men
and women learn how good at its worst life is, or speak the lightning-lie
by which the bones of a dead world are exposed to the disillusioned soul.
This had been a great day, because, in it, physical being had joyously
celebrated itself in a wild business of the hills; in air so fresh and
sweet that it almost sparkled to the eye; in a sun that was hot, but did
not punish; at a sport by which the earliest men in the earliest age of
the world made life a rare sensation. The man who has not chased the
wild pony in the hills with the lasso on his arm, riding, as they say in
the West, "Hell for leather," down the steep hillside, over the rock and
the rough land, balancing on his broncho with the dexterity of a bird or
a baboon, has failed to find one of life's supreme pleasures.
In the foothills, many miles away from Slow Down Ranch and Tralee, there
lived a herd of wild ponies, and it had been the ambition of a dozen
ranchmen and broncho-busters thereabouts to capture one or many.
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