Into the farthest corner of densely packed cedar boughs Silvermane pressed himself and watched.  The Indian rode around the corral, circling closer and closer, yet appearing not to see the stallion.  Many rounds he made; closer he got, and always with the same steady gait.  Silvermane left his corner and tried another.  The old unwearying round brought Charger and the Navajo close by him.  Silvermane pranced out of his thicket of boughs; he whistled; he wheeled with his shiny hoofs lifting.  In an hour the Indian was edging the outer circle of the corral, with the stallion pivoting in the centre, ears laid back, eyes shooting sparks, fight in every line of him.  And the circle narrowed inward.

Suddenly the Navajo sent the roan at Silvermane and threw his halter.  It spread out like a lasso, and the loop went over the head of the stallion, slipped to the knot and held fast, while the rope tightened.  Silvermane leaped up, forehoofs pawing the air, and his long shrill cry was neither whistle, snort, nor screech, but all combined.  He came down, missing Charger with his hoofs, sliding off his haunches.  The Indian, his bronze muscles rippling, close-hauled on the rope, making half hitches round his bony wrist.

In a whirl of dust the roan drew closer to the gray, and Silvermane began a mad race around the corral.  The roan ran with him nose to nose.  When Silvermane saw he could not shake him, he opened his jaws, rolled back his lip in an ugly snarl, his white teeth glistening, and tried to bite.  But the Indian’s moccasined foot shot up under the stallion’s ear and pressed him back.  Then the roan hugged Silvermane so close that half the time the Navajo virtually rode two horses.  But for the rigidity of his arms, and the play and sudden tension of his leg-muscles, the Indian’s work would have appeared commonplace, so dexterous was he, so perfectly at home in his dangerous seat.  Suddenly he whooped and August Naab hauled back the gate, and the two horses, neck and neck, thundered out upon the level stretch.

“Good!” cried August.  “Let him rip now, Navvy.  All over but the work, Jack.  I feared Silvermane would spear himself on some of those dead cedar spikes in the corral.  He’s safe now.”

Jack watched the horses plunge at breakneck speed down the stretch, circle at the forest edge, and come tearing back.  Silvermane was pulling the roan faster than he had ever gone in his life, but the dark Indian kept his graceful seat.  The speed slackened on the second turn, and decreased as, mile after mile, the imperturbable Indian held roan and gray side to side and let them run.