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Show 3iJPMIfafftM'. U W.M.U. FEATURES-" - " THE STORY THUS FAR: A white eolt la born on the Goose Bar ranch.-hlgh In the Rockies of southern Wyoming. Its color Indicates that It Is a throwback to the Albino, a wild stallion. Its sire Is Appalachian, a famous -racing stud, a few months on the range changes the volte foal, named Thunderhead but com-uonly com-uonly called Goblin, from an ungainly, awkward beast to a strong and lntelli. lent animal, big for bis age. During the winter he Is brought In to the stables, ted oats, and given a little training. Goblin Is sent back to the range again In May, a full-fledged yearling. One day be starts off southward on a lone Jour-aey Jour-aey of exploration. He comes to the loot of a range of mountains. CHAPTER IX Another thing that had happened a band of horses was grazing near the highway. A -car passed, filled with noisy, ugly-looking men. Going up the hill by the overpass, one of them had shouted, "See that old mare? Bet I can hit her!" He had taken his gun, stood up in Ihe car, and pulled the trigger. The section gang working on the railroad that ran alongside the highway high-way saw the whole thing. They saw the man shoot, saw the mare leap spasmodically, then go down with a crash, heard the burst of raucous rau-cous laughter from the men, saw the car speed up and vanish over the hill. 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 tha 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 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 terrace 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. Some 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 AT- - 1 1 -M . . Unhnlai tn Ken began to shake in bed. A white colt in a band of dark horses bow easy to mark and single outl However, there would have been the body they hadn't found any body. There was some comfort in that Goblinj meanwhile, was feeding In lush pastures south of the border. Though in a single afternoon's play on the Saddle Back he or any one of the yearlings could run twenty miles and not know It, he had taken a full week to work his way to the foot of the Buckhorn Range. There was so much to see on the way. So many dells and ravines to explore. Bo many hillocks to stand upon, gazing and studying and sniffing so wide a country so many bands of antelope and elk. The grass In' every ev-ery meadow tasted different It was in this fashion that the Goblin Gob-lin moved. After his first start x iouthward he had just drifted. Now here he was. It was the river that interested interest-ed him. He had smelled it for miles before he reached it. He had never seen anything like it It took him 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 a voice too. A loud voice that never nev-er ceased its burble of sound. Incessantly, In-cessantly, it talked, whispered, gurgled, gur-gled, chuckled. Having' power in himself, he knew that there was power In the river. m xsss The creature waa ai big as he was himself. uie iimiu ui any uuiuiui-i " 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 fromT 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 off to a place at some distance where a ridge ran jag-gedly jag-gedly up the cliff. And then to Gob- rating it, oLuiiuuie brink, he felt that it challenged him, and he gathered himself to fight back. In an hour he had accepted the fact that the river would not attack him. It ignored him. Nothing he did altered its course or its behavior. beha-vior. He drank from it, at last, and the river did not even mind that. He followed it upward. It was leading him further into those hills which got steeper as they got closer until they sheered up, leaning over ' him. And the river was narrower, between higher walls. Its voice was a deep roar now. Occasionally, looking look-ing ahead, he would see It coming down over a wall of rock blue on the slide, a smother of white below. So it happened that he was standing stand-ing on a flat rock, just gathering himself to leap to another rock In midstream when the thing was flung against his legs, so terrifying him that he made his leap badly, and was swept Into the channel, and from then on knew nothing but the struggle to keep his nose above Water and claw himself out. When he accomplished this he was some yards downstream. Even while he was shaking himself, his head turned to look back. What was It that had hit him? He must know. It was still there on the rock on which he had been standing, and It didn't move. 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, colled like Invisible, microscopic snakes, in the chromosomes chromo-somes passed down to him by his 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 les- 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 sitting 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 ap- With his ears alert and his eyes fastened on it Goblin went back and Investigated. A foal! Not so unlike himself, except ex-cept that instead of being all white. It had brown markings on it. It was, In fact like Calico, his piebald Granny. Goblin was shuddering all over. The foal had no eyes they had been picked out. In half a dozen places there were bloody gashes-It gashes-It was at this moment that he leaped to meet the flapping black cloud that dropped down upon him from the sky. Huge pinions beat about his head. The creature was as big as he was himself. Goblin emitted the first real scream of his life when, for a moment the terrible terri-ble face looked closely into his own, and the great hooked beak drove for his eyes. Goblin reared and went over back-Ward, back-Ward, the eagle flailing him with wings, beak, and talons. Rolling on the narrow rocky beach hatf. in and half out of water Goblin struggled strug-gled to get from under the creature. crea-ture. When he gained his feet, with the instinct of the fighting stallion, he darted his head down to bite the foreleg of his enemy. He got it SOn lettiucu. .m.. wiujs luuuiiiaiua 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 dell-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, 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 earth. He followed the torrent upward until he could follow it no longer. It filled the gorge. Streams ran over the sides of the cliff to join it In the crevices of rock were pockets of snow. The stream was choked with the spring floods. It pounded and churned. A dead tree drifting parently closed me pain, dui 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 Jose from the valley val-ley floor, reaching as high as the jagged and perpendicular cliff which ringed it and shut it in. (TO BE CONTINUED) |