As soon as I knew Hector, I began to emulate him. My boyish experiments were on donkeys, and failed. “I couldn’t wallop ’em. O no, no!” That was my difficulty. Had I but met an innocent and docile donkey in his downy years! Alas! only the perverted donkey, bristly and incorrigible, came under my tutorship. I was too humane to give him stick enough, and so he mastered me. Horses I learned to govern by the law of love. The relation of friendship once established between man and horse, there is no trouble. A centaur is created. The man wills whither; the horse, at the will of his better half, does his best to go thither. I became, very early, Hippodamos, not by force, but by kindness. All lower beings,--fiendish beings apart,--unless spoilt by treachery, seek the society of the higher; as man, by nature, loves God. Horses will do all they know for men, if man will only let them. All they need is a slight hint to help their silly willing brains, and they dash with ardor at their business of galloping a mile a minute, or twenty miles an hour, or of leaping a gully, or pulling tonnage. They put so much reckless, break-neck frenzy in their attempt to please and obey the royal personage on their back, that he needs to be brave indeed to go thoroughly with them. The finer the horse, the more delicate the magnetism between him and man. Knight and his steed have an affinity for each other. I fancied that Gerrian’s black, after our mutual friendly recognition on the prairie, would like me better as our intimacy grew. After hobnobbing with cracked tumblers of the Mission Dolores wine, Gerrian and I mounted our mustangs and rode toward the corral. All about on the broad slopes, the ranchero’s countless cattle were feeding. It was a patriarchal scene. The local patriarch, in a red flannel shirt purpled by sun and shower, in old buckskin breeches with the fringe worn away and decimated along its files whenever a thong was wanted, in red-topped boots with the maker’s name, Abel Cushing, Lynn, Mass., stamped in gilt letters on the red,--in such costume the local patriarch hardly recalled those turbaned and white-robed sheiks of yore, Abraham and his Isaac. But he represented the same period of history modernized, and the same type of man Americanized; and I have no doubt his posterity will turn out better than Abraham’s, and scorn peddling, be it Austrian loans or “ole do’.” The cattle scampered away from us, as we rode, hardly less wild than the buffaloes on the Platte. Whenever we rose on the crest of a hillock, we could see several thousands of the little fierce bullocks,--some rolling away in flight, in a black breadth, like a shaken carpet; some standing in little groups, like field officers at a review, watching the movements as squadron after squadron came and went over the scene; some, as arbitrators and spectators, surrounding a pair of champion bulls butting and bellowing in some amphitheatre among the swells of land.