Every day from then on the time the girl had used a riding Cloudy was spent in the stable and by that horse. Liniments and medicines of all kinds was dug up and bought and used, and as the stable man watched her trying to do her best, he'd only shake his head. He knowed it was no use, and if the horse did come out of it, he'd never come out of it enough to ever be of any use as a saddle horse again. The horse had been foundered.--The twenty-four hours without water, the hard run and sweating up, and then cooled off sudden in ice cold water, and drinking his fill of that same water, and all at once, had crippled him and stoved him up in a way where he'd be plum useless only maybe for slow work and hooked to a wagon. A month went by, and the doctoring went on, the girl always a hoping, and then one day she came to the stable to find the horse gone. She hunted up the stable man and finally, after a lot of running around, found him up in the hay loft. "I figgered," says that feller on finding himself cornered, "that it'd be best to turn him loose. There's good range up north a ways and thinking it'd do him more good to be loose that way on good feed, I just took him up there." But there was no good range in that country, not for many miles. The stable man had lied to save the girl's feelings,--and instead, realizing that he couldn't turn the horse loose only maybe to let him starve, and being he couldn't afford to keep and feed a useless horse, there'd been only one way out. He'd sold him to a man who bought old horses and killed 'em for chicken feed. CHAPTER XIV "DARK CLOUDS, THEN TALL GRASS" The man collecting old wore out and crippled horses had come along and led him away. He had a little salt-grass pasture a short distance out of town, and there's where he took the old horse. He turned him loose amongst a few more old horses, and would keep him there till the time come when some "chicken man" around town would need the carcass of one of the horses to feed to his chickens; then the horse what looked like it had the shortest to live would be killed and hauled away. It didn't look like the end was very far for the mouse colored horse. All the work he'd done and the interest he'd had while under the names of Smoky and The Cougar, had stopped being accounted for and sort of pinched out under the name of Cloudy, and now he had no name. He was just "chicken feed," and soon, if he stayed in that pasture, all what he'd been and done would be blotted out with the crack of a rifle shot.