The Fancy Dancer

ordinarily wouldn’t do well on a dry place like that, these were carefully watered with a little pipeline, and they were thriving green.
    While a few of the sheds were old, the bam and the corrals were new. The house was a rambling brick affair with picture windows overlooking the bench.
    It was beautifully kept, shaded with young mountain ashes and weeping birches, flanked by beds of pansies and red geraniums. The lawn was freshly mowed and gave off that hayfield smell. A sprinkler whirled on a spot where the grass had gotten dry and blue-colored. On the side was a flagstone terrace of pink native granite, set with lounge chairs.
    The whole place had a look of a little Eden pains- 120
    takingly grown on that dry bench, with the help of hard work and irrigation.
    As we parked the car and got out, the silence and the immensity of the open country closed around us.
    Just then a stubby little Australian blue heeler rushed around the comer of the house at us, barking. The front door opened, and a tall, spare young man in faded Levi’s, work shirt and walking boots stood there, grinning. He had a round, weatherbeaten face, sideburns, and eyes so blue they looked dyed. He must have been in his late twenties.
    “Lady, stop that racket,” he yelled at the dog. He came down the flagstone steps, and shook hands with us.
    “Let’s have us a beer,” said Larry. “My partner’ll be along.”
    In another two minutes, we were out on that terrace lounging in the chairs, with the little blue dog now wiggling happily around us and icy cans of beer in our hands. The beer slid down my throat like a mountain brook after the long dusty drive. Larry was a relaxed, warm person with the goofiest kind of cow-country humor, and pretty soon he had us laughing our heads off.
    But when I asked Larry what kind of horses they bred, he got quite serious. I’d expected him to say quarter horses or Appaloosas or something, but to my surprise he said:
    “Mustangs.”
    “I don’t know anything about horses, but I thought mustangs were extinct. Didn’t the dogfood people kill them all?”
    “They almost did,” said Larry. “There’s about fifteen thousand of them left in the West. They’re running around in the back country on the public lands. They’ve gotten real man-shy, they’ve been hunted so much. The scissorbills in Washington finally passed a law that really stopped most of the hunting.”
    “But what are they good for? Aren’t they wild and runty?”
    “They’re a helluva horse,” he said. “They conquered the Americas. And they’re a persecuted minority. That’s why we breed them.”
    The words “persecuted minority” stuck in my ears for a moment. That was an odd thing to say about a breed of horse.
    “Of course, some of them are pretty common looking,” Larry was saying. ‘They crossbred a lot with draft mares and other breeds that ran wild or the studs stole them. But those old Andalusian genes are real potent Now and then you will see a horse that’s the pure old Spanish-Arab-Barb type, with the back that’s missing the lumbar vertebra, and everything. We used to make the rounds of all the dogfood auctions and pick up those typey horses for five, ten cents a pound, a stud here, a colt there. Boy, those horses would come out of the trucks looking like holy hell, half starved, crippled, blinded with buckshot We put together our whole breeding herd for less than a thousand dollars, and that’s counting shipping costs.”
    I was very moved. “Are any other breeders doing this?”
    “A few,” said Larry. “We’ve even got a studbook now. A horse can’t be registered till he’s dead and we can count his backbones.” He grinned. “Of course, the bank thinks we’re nuts. That’s why we don’t make our money on the horses. We’ve got a good commercial cow operation going here, and we make out as well as anybody else in the cow business—which is to say, not so good these days, but...”
    He looked off across the barnyard and said, “Well, here come the other two partners. Will and our best stud.”
    “That’s the horse that’s going to enter the race,” said Vidal to me.
    “Damn right he is,” said Larry. “He’s going to put all those high-flyin’ quarter horses right in his back pocket.”
    Will rode right up across the lawn with a grin on his face, a little cigar clenched in his white com-ker-nel teeth. He was the same age as Larry, wore a battered leather vest and leggings, and was so