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Show XW ' W.N.U. FEATURES . - I v. STORY THUS FAB: A white colt I on Uc Goose tor ranch, ulcb In tutin of southern Wyoming. Its " todlcaUs that It Is a throwback , Albino, a wild stallion. Its sire 'ELlieMan. 'nons racln lU(L twmoBOu on Uie ranse changes the foI. named Thundcrhcad but com-1jt com-1jt filled Goblin, from an ungainly, ui bo"1 10 a Blrong and ,ntcUi iTnUnal, big for his age. During the be Is brought In to the stables, ffrtts and given ft UtUe training. jj icnt back to the range again j.y a full fledged yearling. One day dirts off southward on a lone Jour- d exploration. He comes to the Got range of mountains. CHAPTER IX pother thing that had happened 4 band of horses was grazing near H highway- A car passed, filled rib noisy, ugly-looking men. Going , the hill by the overpass, one of 5a had shouted. "See that old cue? Bet I can hit her!" Es had taken his gun, stood up In car, and pulled the trigger, ffte section gang working on the fpfcoad that ran alongside the highly high-ly saw the whole thing. They 'Bs the man shoot, saw the mare U spasmodically, then go down Irtta crash, heard the burst of rau-'aJa rau-'aJa laughter from the men, saw the 'or speed up and vanish over the I Ken began to shake in bed. A die colt in a band of dark horses :i easy to mark and single out! Swever, there would have been the 'loij-they hadn't found any body. re was some comfort in that. Goblin, meanwhile; was feeding fchuh pastures south of the border. Cough In a single afternoon's play 'to the Saddle Eack he or any one 'a the yearlings could run twenty Sl es and not know It, he had taken . .J week to work his way to the 'tot of he Buckhorn Range. There 'ni bo much to see on the way. So cany dells and ravines to explore. ' So many hillocks to stand upon, 'pang and studying and sniffing so lids a country so many, bands of 'ulelope and elk. The grass in evil ev-il meadow tasted different. It was in this fashion that the Gob-la Gob-la moved. After his first start Whward he had just drifted. Now Uiere he was. I It was the river that interest-td interest-td him. He had smelled it for miles belore he reached it. He had uver seen anything like it. It took tim a long time to decide that there was nothing dangerous about it, though It moved. It plunged and leaped. It hurled itself over rocks. It tossed chunks of itself into the air. It was alive therefore. It had i voice too. A loud voice that nev-jer nev-jer ceased its burble of sound. Incessantly, In-cessantly, it talked, whispered, gur-glcd. gur-glcd. chuckled. Having power in himself, he knew Jtat there was power in the river. Facing it, standing there on the irink, he felt that it challenged him, wl he gathered himself to fight ack. In an hour he had accepted the bet that the river would not attack k It ignored him. Nothing he 21 altered its course or its beha-fa- He drank from it, at last, "tithe river did not even mind that. He followed it upward. It was aling him further into those hills ch got steeper as they got closer 313 they sheered up, leaning over And the river was narrower, Wween higher walls. Its voice was Hecp roar now. Occasionally, look-i look-i ahead, he would see it coming jiwn over a wall of rock blue on )shde, a smother of white below. ; il happened that he was stand- on a flat rock, just gathering elt 10 leap to another rock in stream when the thing was flung t his legs, so terrifying him :t he made his leap badly, and Inswept into the channel, and i then on knew nothing but the ,jle to keep his nose above ,nter and claw himself out. lhenhe accomplished this he was e yards downstream. Even while shaking himself, his head to look back. What was had hit him? He must know. : rtS'. Btm therc on the rock on ; he had been standing, and it i move. i Jjth his ears alert and his eyes iZl 00 Goblin wen back and 3 tlgated. J11 Not 50 unlik himself, ex-" f that Instead of being all white. f,M0Yn markines on it. It was. 'Cny CahC' hiS Piebald ft" shuddering all over, oaibad no eyes they had been if ere bloody gashes-L gashes-L as at this moment that he JJ.0, me?t the flapping black 5!twr drPPcd down upon him ''Cv ?y' Hu8e Pinions beat 7 to. head- Th creature was "ilttM Was hlmseli- Goblin lHh fllst real screa"i of his - War 1' fr a moment,- the terri-?M terri-?M tuel00ked closely into his own. 'hu great hoked beak drove I Gobi Cye8 i H n rcared and went over back- Ki k ,eagle flailinS him with and tains- Roing i',Mhai,rrow rocky beach half in N to oi water Goblln strue- ?t rm under the crea- 1 lmtt 4 be caIned hls feet. with "C ,?16 flehg stallion, ; -ftlc- head down to bite the oi his enemy Hg gQt lt I between his teeth and crunched. He was clawed by the other leg, his shoulder was raked and gouged. The beating wings buffeted his head like clubs. He held on. The beak struck him again and again. Blood spurted from his neck and belly. Suddenly it was gone, shooting straight upward, then sliding into the shelter of the pines. Goblin stood alone, the thin shank, partly covered with fine, closely set feathers, and the curled, cold, fist-like claw, dangling dan-gling from "his teeth. There was a thin, bad-smelling blood oozing from the end of it. He dropped It and stood shuddering. shudder-ing. It terrified him. Then, with his insatiable curiosity, he must stoop to smell It again. Never would he forget that smell. It sent him up on his hind legs, snorting. His ears were filled with the sound the eagle was making a furious screaming, "Kark! Kark! Kark!" He leaped away from tho fatal spot and went scrambling over the ' rocks downstream, working away from the river bank toward easier going. The eagle peered from his pine tree. He sat on a bare bough, balancing bal-ancing himself on one claw and one stump and his spread wings. At his repeated cry of rage the woods around became alive with small, frightened, scurrying animals. His J m ftt The creature was as big as he was liimsclf. eyes, terrible In their far vision and their predatory determination, were fastened on the colt galloping northward, north-ward, a white streak down the dark brink of the canyon and at last a moving dot on the plains, five miles away. The Goblin used the speed that he had never used before; that had reached him, coiled like invisible, microscopic snakes, in the chromosomes chromo-somes passed down to him by bis forbears. It was a great run. Next morning when the sun rose, the Goblin stood comfortably among the yearlings of the Goose Bar ranch, turned broadside to the delicious de-licious penetrating rays, snoring softly in peace and blissful ease. It lasted for a week the peace and the bliss. A week in which, as it happened, no one of the McLaughlin McLaugh-lin family discovered that the prodigal prodi-gal had returned. It was during that week that young Ken McLaughlin, in a fury of despair over the loss of his colt, stood on the top of Castle Rock and hurled down the cherished stop watch which was to have timed the future racer. At the end of the week Goblin left the herd of yearlings and drifted south again. His terror had changed, as all terror should, into knowledge and acceptance of a danger; a lesson les-son learned. And those mountains down there exerted an irresistible fascination over him. He went more slowly than before. He spent a week grazing with a little band of antelope in a dcll-like valley on the way. And he explored extensively on both sides of the lower reaches of the river. When at last he reached the rock where he had been attacked by the eagle it was near the end of July. This time there was no piebald foal lying across the rock in midstream, mid-stream, no monster bird in the air. Goblin spent a half-hour by that rock, smelling and snorting, going over every inch of the little beach where he and the eagle had fought. Something like a dried curled branch lay upon it with a darkish clot on the end. He circled it. then reared and came down pawing at it. He cut it to bits and ground It into the followed the torrent upward until be could follow it no longer. It filled the gorge. Streams ran over the sides of the cliff to join It. In the crevice3 of rock were pockets of snow. The stream was choked with the spring floods. It pounded and churned. A dead tree drifting down was hurled tens of feet into the air. Goblin looked at the river a long time. He raised his head. What was beyond? Up there? His nostrils flared. The river and the rock walls were so steep and so high that he could no longer see the sky, only craggy peaks, and ever more of them. But up beyond all that was where he must go. Cows and horses are by instinct expert engineers and will always find the easiest way through a mountainous moun-tainous country. Goblin detoured from the river on the eastern side. He had stiff climbing to do but there were breaks in the river walls and running with the brood mares on the Saddle Back had made him as sure-footed as a goat. Hours of hard going brought him at length to the last grassy terraee before the rocks shot up in an almost sheer cliff. The place was like a park with clumps of pine and rock, little dells and groves; and, scattered at the base of the cliff and on its summit, numbers 'of the huge smooth-surfaced stones like the one balanced on the top of Castle Rock on the Goose Bar ranch. Sonie of them as large as houses and perfectly smooth and spherical, these boulders are to be found all through the country of the Continental Conti-nental Divide, creating a wonder in the mind of any beholder as to what great glaciers in what bygone age could have ground and polished them and left them at last hanging by a hair on narrow shelves of rock, or balanced on peaks, or suspended above crevices where one Inch more of space on either side would have freed them to go crashing down. Goblin was hungry. He took his bearings first, then began to graze. Rounding a clump of trees he halted halt-ed and lifted his head sharply. There, not a hundred yards away, close to the base of the cliff wall, were two handsome bay colts grazing. graz-ing. Goblin was quiet for a moment, savoring the Interest and delight of a meeting with some of his own kind. Then he whinnied and stamped his foot. The colts looked up. With innocent in-nocent friendliness they trotted toward to-ward him. Being a stranger Goblin had to discover certain things immediately. im-mediately. Were these mares or stallions? Where did they come from? Would they be friends or enemies? ene-mies? So, Just as children, meeting, always ask each other, What's your name? How old are you? Where do you live? these colts exchanged information, in-formation, squealing and snorting and jumping about. This was interrupted by a ringing neigh that came, it seemed, right out of the wall of rock. The colts responded immediately. They whinnied whin-nied in answer and galloped toward the wall, angling ofT to a place at some distance where a ridge ran jag-gedly jag-gedly up the cliff. And then to Goblin's Gob-lin's amazement, they galloped right into the wall and disappeared. Goblin galloped after. Turning the shoulder of the ridge, he found himself him-self in a narrow chasm which split the rampart of rock and led some distance into the heart of it. There was no sign of the colts, but the passageway was full of the smell of horses. Goblin trotted confidently on. Suddenly there was a harsh scream from above, and the shadow of wide wings drifted across the chasm. As long as he lived a moving shadow shad-ow falling upon him from above would galvanize Goblin into terrified action. He crouched, backing, and his up-flung head and straining eyes tried to spy out his enemy. But not by looking could the colt see and apprehend the eagles' eyrie, clinging to a ledge far up on the peak, with one eagle silting on the edge of the nest, and the other the one-legged eagle drifting down over the chasm. Colts and eagles live on different planes. Only by the cold shadow falling on him, only by the scream, with its strange mingling of ferocity and sadness, only by the horror and shuddering within himself could he know his danger. He plunged forward, driving straight toward the rock which apparently ap-parently closed the path. But arriving ar-riving there, the passageway turned. He went on, zigzagging. He saw and heard nothing more of the eagle. At last the sides of the chasm sloped away, exposing a wider wedge of sky. And in front of him was a mass of the great boulders which seemed to have been rolled down the sides, choking the chasm completely. But there was still the smell of horses Goblin went on. And a turn showed him an open way through a sort of keyhole, roofed with a single great boulder which hung on slight unevenness on the side walls. Beyond, Be-yond, Goblin glimpsed blue sky and green grass. Galloping through-, he came out into brilliant sunlight and a far vista of valley and mountain. Goblin had found his way into the crater of an extinct volcano. Two miles or more across and of an irregular oblong shape, the valley was belly-deep in the finest mountain grass. Here and there, rocky or tree-covered hills rose from the valley val-ley floor, reaching as high as the jagged and perpendicular cliff which ringed lt and shut It in. t (TO BE CONTINUED) |