“Maybe you seen that, Miss Jordan?  You seen Jud Hopkin’s roan go by them fancy Coles mares?  Well, well, it done my heart good!  This gent Coles comes out of the East to teach us poor ignorant ranchers what right hoss flesh should be.  He’s going to auction off them half dozen mares after the race.  Well, sir, I wouldn’t give fifty dollars a head for ’em.  Nor neither will nobody else when they see them mares fade away in the home stretch; nope, neither will nobody else.”

In this reference to over-wise Easterners there was a direct thrust at the girl, but she accepted it with a smile.

“Don’t you think they’ll last for the mile and a quarter, Mr. Corson?”

“Think?  I don’t think.  I know!  Picture hosses like them—­well, they’d ought to be left in books.  They run a little.  Inside a half mile they bust down.  Look how long they are!”

“But their backs are short,” put in Marianne hastily.

“Backs short?” scoffed Corson, “Why, lady look for yourself!”

She choked back her answer.  If the self-satisfied old fellow could not see how far back the withers reached and how far forward the quarters, so that the true back was very short, it was the part of wisdom to let experience teach him.  Yet she could not refrain from saying:  “You’ll see how they last in the race, Mr. Corson.”

“We’ll both see,” he answered.  “There goes a gent that’s going to lose money today!”

A big red-faced man with his hat on the back of his head and sweat coursing down his cheeks, was pushing through the crowd calling with a great voice: 

“Here’s Lady Mary money.  Evens or odds on Lady Mary!” “That’s Colonel Dickinson,” said Corson.  “He comes around every year to play the races here and most generally he picks winners.  But today he’s gone wrong.  His eye has been took by the legs of them Coles hosses and he’s gone crazy betting on ’em.  Well, he gets plenty of takers!”

Indeed, Colonel Dickinson was stopped right and left to record wagers.

“I got down a little bet myself, this morning, agin his Lady Mary.”  Corson chuckled at the thought of such easy money.

“What makes you so sure?” asked Marianne, for even if she were lucky enough to get the mares she felt that from Corson she could learn beforehand the criticisms of Lew Hervey.

“So sure?  Why anybody with half an eye—­” here he remembered that he was talking to a lady and continued more mildly.  “Them bay mares ain’t hosses—­they’re tricks.  Look how skinny all that underpinning is, Miss Jordan.”

“When they fill out—­” she began.

“Tush!  They won’t never fill out proper.  Too much leg to make a hoss.  Too much daylight under ’em.  Besides, what good would they be for cow-work?  High headed fools, all of ’em, and a hoss that don’t know enough to run with his head low can’t turn on a forty acre lot.  Don’t tell me!”