Leaving the old mare to ruminate upon this eccentric proceeding, he advanced a pace or two, and dropped down upon his knees.
Then drawing the piece of curved iron out of his capacious pocket, he applied it to a hoof-print conspicuously outlined in the turf. It fitted.
“Fits!” he exclaimed, with a triumphant gesticulation, “Dog-goned if it don’t!”
“Tight as the skin o’ a tick!” he continued, after adjusting the broken shoe to the imperfect hoof-print, and taking it up again. “By the eturnal! that ere’s the track o’ a creetur—mayhap a murderer!”
Chapter Seventy Three.
The Prairie Island.
A herd of a hundred horses—or three times the number—pasturing upon a prairie, although a spectacle of the grandest kind furnished by the animal kingdom, is not one that would strike a Texan frontiersman as either strange, or curious. He would think it stranger to see a single horse in the same situation.
The former would simply be followed by the reflection: “A drove of mustangs.” The latter conducts to a different train of thought, in which there is an ambiguity. The solitary steed might be one of two things: either an exiled stallion, kicked out of his own cavallada, or a roadster strayed from some encampment of travellers.