“Yep.  Big enough.  He’s kind of a freak hoss, you see.  Runs to almost seventeen hands, I’ve heard tell, though I ain’t seen him.  He’s over to the Bridewell place yonder in the hills—­along about fifteen miles by the road, I figure.  He run till he was three without ever being taken up, and he got wild as a mustang.  They never was good on managing on the Bridewell place, you see?  And then when they tried to break him he started doing some breaking on his own account.  They say he can jump about halfway to the sky and come down stiff-legged in a way that snaps your neck near off.  I seen young Huniker along about a month after he tried to ride Diablo.  Huniker was a pretty good rider, by all accounts, but he was sure a sick gent around hosses after Diablo got through with him.  Scared of a ten-year-old mare, Huniker was, after Diablo finished with him.  Scott Porter tried him, too.  That was a fight!  Lasted close onto an hour, they say, nip and tuck all the way.  Diablo wasn’t bucking all the time.  No, he ain’t that way.  He waits in between spells till he’s thought up something new to do.  And he’s always thinking, they say.  But if he wasn’t so mean he’d be a wonderful hoss.  Got a stride as long as from here to that shed, they say.”

He rambled on with a growing enthusiasm.

“And think of a hoss like that being given away!”

“Given away?” said Bull with a sudden interest.

And then he remembered that horses were outside of his education entirely.

He listened with gloomy attention while his host went on.  “Yes, sir.  Given away is what I said and given away is what I mean.  Old Chick Bridewell has kept him long enough, he says.  He’s tired of paying buckaroos for getting busted up trying to ride that hoss.  Man-eater, that’s what he calls Diablo, and he wants to give the hoss away to the first man that can ride him.  Hal Dunbar heard about it and sent up word that he was coming up to ride him.”

“He must be a brave man,” said Bull innocently.  He had an immense capacity for admiring others.

“Brave?” The proprietor paused as though this had not occurred to him before.  “Why, they ain’t such a thing as fear in Hal Dunbar, I guess.  But if he decides to ride Diablo, he’ll ride him, well enough.  He has his way about things, Hal Dunbar does.”

The sketchy portrait impressed Bull Hunter greatly.  “You know him, then?”

“How’d I be mistaking you for him if I knowed him?  No, he lives way down south, but they’s a pile heard about him that’s never seen him.”

For some reason the words of his host remained in the mind of Bull as he went down the road that day.  Oddly enough, he pictured man and horse as being somewhat alike—­Diablo vast and black and fierce, and Hal Dunbar dark and huge and terrible of eye, also; which was proof enough that Bull Hunter was a good deal of a child.  He cared less about the world as it was than for the world as it might be, and as long as life gave him something to dream about, he did not care in the least about the facts of existence.