So it was arranged that the race was to come off at three o’clock the next day, on the mesa, some distance from town.  As soon as the news got abroad, the whole population of Left Bower and vicinity knocked off work and assembled in the various bars to discuss it.  The Englishman and his horse were general favorites, and aside from the unpopularity of the colonel, nobody had ever seen his “cayuse.”  Still the element of patriotism came in, making the betting very nearly even.

A race-course was marked off on the mesa and at the appointed hour every one was there except the colonel.  It was arranged that each man should ride his own horse, and the Englishman, who had acquired something of the free-and-easy bearing that distinguishes the “mining sharp,” was already atop of his magnificent animal, with one leg thrown carelessly across the pommel of his Mexican saddle, as he puffed his cigar with calm confidence in the result of the race.  He was conscious, too, that he possessed the secret sympathy of all, even of those who had felt it their duty to bet against him.  The judge, watch in hand, was growing impatient, when the colonel appeared about a half-mile away, and bore down upon the crowd.  Everyone was eager to inspect his mount; and such a mount as it proved to be was never before seen, even in Left Bower!

You have seen “perfect skeletons” of horses often enough, no doubt, but this animal was not even a perfect skeleton; there were bones missing here and there which you would not have believed the beast could have spared.  “Little” the colonel had called her!  She was not an inch less than eighteen hands high, and long out of all reasonable proportion.  She was so hollow in the back that she seemed to have been bent in a machine.  She had neither tail nor mane, and her neck, as long as a man, stuck straight up into the air, supporting a head without ears.  Her eyes had an expression in them of downright insanity, and the muscles of her face were afflicted with periodical convulsions that drew back the corners of the mouth and wrinkled the upper lip so as to produce a ghastly grin every two or three seconds.  In color she was “claybank,” with great blotches of white, as if she had been pelted with small bags of flour.  The crookedness of her legs was beyond all comparison, and as to her gait it was that of a blind camel walking diagonally across innumerable deep ditches.  Altogether she looked like the crude result of Nature’s first experiment in equifaction.

As this libel on all horses shambled up to the starting post there was a general shout; the sympathies of the crowd changed in the twinkling of an eye!  Everyone wanted to bet on her, and the Englishman himself was only restrained from doing so by a sense of honor.  It was growing late, however, and the judge insisted on starting them.  They got off very well together, and seeing the mare was unconscionably slow the Englishman soon pulled his animal in and permitted the ugly thing