She turned her head and looked at him gravely. "You must be aware, Mr. Burleson, that it is not choice with us," she said. There was nothing of bitterness in her voice; she leaned forward, patting the mare's chestnut neck for a moment, then swung back, sitting straight as a cavalryman in her saddle. "Of course," she said, smiling for the first time, "it will break my heart to sell The Witch, but"--she patted the mare again--"the mare won't grieve; it takes a dog to do that; but horses--well, I know horses enough to know that even The Witch won't grieve." "That is a radical theory, Miss Elliott," said Burleson, amused. "What about the Arab and his loving steed?" "That is not a legend for people who know horses," she replied, still smiling. "The love is all on our side. You know horses, Mr. Burleson. Is it not the truth--the naked truth, stripped of poetry and freed from tradition?" "Why strip poetry from anything?" he asked, laughing. She rode on in silence for a while, the bright smile fading from lips and eyes. "Oh, you are quite right," she said; "let us leave what romance there may be in the world. My horse loves me like a dog. I am very happy to believe it, Mr. Burleson." From the luminous shadow of her sombrero she looked out across the stretch of marsh, where from unseen pools the wild-duck were rising, disturbed by the sound of their approach. And now the snipe began to dart skyward from under their horses' feet, filling the noon silence with their harsh "squak! squak!" "It's along here somewhere," said Burleson, leaning forward in his saddle to scan the swale-grass. A moment later he said, "Look there, Miss Elliott!" In the tall, blanched grasses a velvety black space marked the ashes of a fire, which had burned in a semi-circle, then westward to the water's edge. "You see," he said, "it was started to sweep the vlaie to the pine timber. The wind changed, and held it until the fire was quenched at the shore." "I see," she said. He touched his horse, and they pressed forward along the bog's edge. "Here," he pointed out, "they fired the grass again, you see, always counting on the west wind; and here again, and yonder too, and beyond that, Miss Elliott--in a dozen places they set the grass afire. If that wet east wind had not come up, nothing on earth could have saved a thousand acres of white pine--and I'm afraid to say how many deer and partridges and woodcock.... It was a savage bit of business, was it not, Miss Elliott?" She sat her horse, silent, motionless, pretty head bent, studying the course of the fire in the swale. There was no mistaking the signs; a grass fire had been started, which, had the west wind held, must have become a brush fire, and then the most dreaded scourge of the north, a full-fledged forest-fire in tall timber. After a little while she raised her head and looked full at Burleson, then, without comment, she wheeled her mare eastward across the vlaie towards the pines.