The Red Mustang
begins thusly: Early one bright June morning, not long ago, a high knoll of a prairie in southern New Mexico was occupied as it had never been before. Rattlesnakes had coiled there; prairie-dog sentinels and wolves and antelopes, and even grim old buffalo bulls, had used that swelling mound for a lookout station. Mountains in the distance and a great sweep of the plains could be seen from it. Never until that hour, however, since the grass began to grow, had precisely such a horse pawed and fretted there, while precisely such a boy sat in the saddle and looked around.