Sky Blue by Max Brand

Author:Max Brand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2014-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

They caught the herd the next day, but they did not catch Sky Blue. The herd was traveling slowly and entered a wide valley, some half dozen miles across toward the mouth and narrowing toward the head.

The black stallion carried Larribee around the horses and to the top of the valley. There he turned them. He did not have to show himself, even. The smell of a human being blown down the wind was enough to catch the sensitive nostrils of the mares. They wheeled about and went kiting, for it was not the first time that they had been coursed by men and not the first time that they had lost foals from their sides, sisters and brothers.

They ran down the valley at a good clip and toward the mouth of it. Gurry rushed his horse out from a clump of brushes, shelved that flying mass off to the right, and hounded them back, swerving up the valley.

Far away, at the head of the valley, was big Larribee, ready to head off the mass of thundering horses if they came up that way. From the distance, he could look down on the wide panorama. He could see every feature of it, so crystal was the mountain air, and he gloried in the sweep of the picture, in the size of the canvas, in the big, wide-shouldered mountains that squatted contentedly all about, lolling at their ease, watching, making no comment, but not indifferent. He felt that their hearts were with the fugitives. Man was an intruder on such a scene.

He saw the horse herd reach the shallow little creek that wandered through the valley. He saw the water dashed to white by the plunging hoofs. He saw the herd speeding up the valley again, and marveled that the little foals were able to keep pace, with such apparent ease, with their larger elders. They seemed to be born with their speed in their feet, fully equipped for the mountain life and the perils of the wild plains.

Gurry gave them a good, hard run, for a couple of miles or more, and then dropped out of sight behind a hummock. There he found the colonel, who dashed out like a jockey after the herd.

In the meantime, Sky Blue seemed to know all about the duties that were imposed upon him as the monarch of the horses. He kept to the rear, since from the rear came danger, weaving from side to side, snorting a warning that made the lagging youngsters scurry, and once or twice running up beside a fat, laboring mare and nipping her shrewdly.

Up the valley they shot, with the colonel perched on the back of a good little mustang mare. He ran that herd to the head of the valley and there the black stallion carried Larribee down on them, shouting, whooping, and madly waving his arms.

Off sheered the leading horses and dashed back down the valley. He hunted them across the shallow creek and saw the water churned white and dashed thirty feet, flying into the air as they passed through it.

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