Approaching slowly and speaking soothingly, he followed the animal, which, after its first flight, seemed gentle enough, and secured the end of the twenty-foot lariat that dragged after him in the grass.  It required him but a few moments to contrive the rope into an ingenious nose-bridle, after the style of the Mexican borsal.  In another he was upon the horse’s back and off at a splendid lope, giving the animal free choice of direction.  “He will take me somewhere,” said Chicken to himself.

It would have been a thing of joy, that untrammelled gallop over the moonlit prairie, even to Chicken, who loathed exertion, but that his mood was not for it.  His head ached; a growing thirst was upon him; the “somewhere” whither his lucky mount might convey him was full of dismal peradventure.

And now he noted that the horse moved to a definite goal.  Where the prairie lay smooth he kept his course straight as an arrow’s toward the east.  Deflected by hill or arroyo or impractical spinous brakes, he quickly flowed again into the current, charted by his unerring instinct.  At last, upon the side of a gentle rise, he suddenly subsided to a complacent walk.  A stone’s cast away stood a little mott of coma trees; beneath it a jacal such as the Mexicans erect—­a one-room house of upright poles daubed with clay and roofed with grass or tule reeds.  An experienced eye would have estimated the spot as the headquarters of a small sheep ranch.  In the moonlight the ground in the nearby corral showed pulverized to a level smoothness by the hoofs of the sheep.  Everywhere was carelessly distributed the paraphernalia of the place—­ropes, bridles, saddles, sheep pelts, wool sacks, feed troughs, and camp litter.  The barrel of drinking water stood in the end of the two-horse wagon near the door.  The harness was piled, promiscuous, upon the wagon tongue, soaking up the dew.

Chicken slipped to earth, and tied the horse to a tree.  He halloed again and again, but the house remained quiet.  The door stood open, and he entered cautiously.  The light was sufficient for him to see that no one was at home.  The room was that of a bachelor ranchman who was content with the necessaries of life.  Chicken rummaged intelligently until he found what he had hardly dared hope for—­a small, brown jug that still contained something near a quart of his desire.

Half an hour later, Chicken—­now a gamecock of hostile aspect—­emerged from the house with unsteady steps.  He had drawn upon the absent ranchman’s equipment to replace his own ragged attire.  He wore a suit of coarse brown ducking, the coat being a sort of rakish bolero, jaunty to a degree.  Boots he had donned, and spurs that whirred with every lurching step.  Buckled around him was a belt full of cartridges with a big six-shooter in each of its two holsters.

Prowling about, he found blankets, a saddle and bridle with which he caparisoned his steed.  Again mounting, he rode swiftly away, singing a loud and tuneless song.