A month went by, and the doctoring went on, the girl always a hoping, and then one day she came to the stable to find the horse gone. She hunted up the stable man and finally, after a lot of running around, found him up in the hay loft.
"I figgered," says that feller on finding himself cornered, "that it'd be best to turn him loose. There's good range up north a ways and thinking it'd do him more good to be loose that way on good feed, I just took him up there."
But there was no good range in that country, not for many miles. The stable man had lied to save the girl's feelings,—and instead, realizing that he couldn't turn the horse loose only maybe to let him starve, and being he couldn't afford to keep and feed a useless horse, there'd been only one way out. He'd sold him to a man who bought old horses and killed 'em for chicken feed.
CHAPTER XIV
"DARK CLOUDS, THEN TALL GRASS"
The man collecting old wore out and crippled horses had come along and led him away. He had a little salt-grass pasture a short distance out of town, and there's where he took the old horse. He turned him loose amongst a few more old horses, and would keep him there till the time come when some "chicken man" around town would need the carcass of one of the horses to feed to his chickens; then the horse what looked like it had the shortest to live would be killed and hauled away.
It didn't look like the end was very far for the mouse colored horse. All the work he'd done and the interest he'd had while under the names of Smoky and The Cougar, had stopped being accounted for and sort of pinched out under the name of Cloudy, and now he had no name. He was just "chicken feed," and soon, if he stayed in that pasture, all what he'd been and done would be blotted out with the crack of a rifle shot.
But the old pony had no hint of that, and as it was he wasn't for quitting as yet. His old stiff legs was still able to carry him around some, the doctoring he'd got at the stable had helped him more than what had been hoped, and then getting out in a pasture where he could keep moving around as he wanted to was helping him some more. Besides, his old heart was still strong, quite a bit solid meat was covering his ribs, and with the salt and wire grass to graze on he could still make out and mighty well.
A few weeks went by when once in a while and every few days, one of the old horses he was pasturing with, was caught, led out, a rifle shot was heard, and he'd never be seen no more. Other old horses was brought in and they'd pasture on with him till one by one they'd also disappear only to be replaced by more of 'em.
The old mouse colored horse must of looked like he was good to live for a long time yet; anyway, the "chicken horse" man had kept him, maybe for emergency, and so he wouldn't be out of horses if an order for one, and that kind was hard to get.