There he paused, shaking and weak, but the mountain top was bare of covert, and scanning it eagerly through the treacherous moonlight he saw there was no immediate danger.  Down the Western slopes he saw a fairyland for horses.  Far beyond rose a second range nearly as lofty as the peak on which he stood, but in between tumbled rolling ground, a dreamy panorama in the moonshine.  One feature was clear, and that was a broad looping of silver among the hills, a river with slender tributaries dodging swiftly down to it from either side.  Alcatraz looked with a swelling heart, thinking of the white-hot deserts which he had known all his life.  The wind which lifted his mane and cooled his hot body carried up, also, the delicious fragrance of the evergreens and it seemed to Alcatraz that he had come in view of a promised land.  Surely he had dreamed of it on many a day in burning, dusty corrals or in oven-like sheds.

The descent was far less precipitous than the climb and far shorter to the plateau.  Just where the true mountains broke out into a pleasant medley of foothills, the stallion stopped to rest.  He nibbled a few mouthfuls of grass growing lush and rank on the edge of a watercourse, waded to the knees in a still pool and blotted out the star-images with the disturbance of his drinking, and then went back onto a hilltop to sleep.

It was full day before he rose and started on again, and to keep his strength for the next stage of the journey, he ate busily first on the lee side of a hill where the grass was thickest and tenderest.  Between mouthfuls he raised his head to gaze down on his new-found land.  It was a day of clouds, thin sheetings and dense cumulus masses sweeping on the west wind and breaking against the mountains.  Alcatraz could not see the crests over which he had climbed the night before, so thick were those breaking ranks of clouds, but the plateau beneath him was dotted with yellow sunshine and in the day it filled to the full the promise of the moonlit night.  He saw wide stretches of meadow; he saw hills sharpsided and smoothly rolling—­places to climb with labor and places to gallop at ease.  He saw streams that promised drink at will; he saw clumps and groves of trees for shelter from sun or storm.  All that a horse could will was here, beyond imaginings.  Alcatraz lifted his beautiful head and neighed across the lowlands.

There was no answer.  His kingdom silently awaited his coming so he struck out at a sharp pace.  The run of the day before, in place of stiffening him, had put him in racing trim and he went like the wind.  He was in playful mood.  He danced and shied as each cloud-shadow struck him, a dim figure in the shade but shining red-chestnut in the sun patches.  On every hand he saw dozens of places where he would have stopped willingly had not more distant beauties lured him on.  There were hills whose tops would serve him as watch towers in time of need.  There were meadows of soft soil where the grass grew long