The Fancy Dancer

swarthily handsome in an Oriental way that he looked more Indian than Vidal.
    The stud came stepping softly over the grass, his 122
    silky hide stained with sweat. Will got off him by the terrace, and the stud stood quietly, bowing his neck and playing with his bit till his lips foamed.
    He was a small horse, looking a lot like a wiry tough Arabian. I knew enough to know that he was a blue roan. His head was lovely as an antelope’s, and you could have put all the Church Fathers’ widsom into one of his dark eyes. His rippled salt-and-pepper mane fell clear of his narrow hard-muscled chest, though his tail was pulled short at his hocks the way ranchers do with a working horse. He was good-looking enough, but the overwhelming impression he gave as he stood there was one of diehard be-damned toughness.
    Will popped open a can of beer, and we expected to see him gulp at it. Instead, he poured a foaming palmful and offered it to the stud. The horse lapped it politely like a cat and finished by carefully licking Will's fingers with his long pink tongue.
    We all laughed.
    “If Flint wins the race,” said Larry, “maybe the Budweiser people will want him to do an ad.”
    “He looks like he’s in great shape,” said Vidal. “If he was a basketball player, I’d be scared to death of him.”
    “We’ve been training him careful. One day hell do fifteen or twenty miles, the next day just eight or ten. Thing about Flint is, he’s a natural pacer. Pacing’s easy on a horse, so he has a big advantage.”
    All the time he talked, Will was gravely sharing the beer with the horse.
    We walked around the ranch, Lady wiggling behind, and they proudly showed us their little operation. Will turned the stud out in a corral and he got down in the dirt and rolled around raunchily to scratch his sweaty back. Then we and Lady got in the truck and drove out to see their cows and their herd of brood mares.
    The fifty mares and their foals ranged in three big pastures. They were in three harems, each under a stud. They were every color of the rainbow—pinto, dun, roan, gray, sorrel. The duns had zebra stripes on their legs. They acted nervous if we came too close, and the stud would come toward us in an unfriendly businesslike way while the lead mare edged the band away.
    “All these adult horses were foaled in the wild,” said Will. “They’ve never had a man on their backs, and we don’t much care to break them. They just roam wild here like they was to home. The foals we got at the auctions, and the foals bom here, are the ones we’ll break and show and sell.”
    “Was Flint bom in the wild?”
    “Yep, he was. He’s sort of our showcase horse. We got him right down in the Pryor Mountains on the Montana-Wyoming border, six years ago. There’s a protected band of a hundred and fifty running up there, and they had a Bureau of Land Management sale to cull some colts.”
    I felt more and more moved. As a ranchland priest, I couldn’t help liking horses, even though I was a little scared of them. Larry’s and Will’s breeding program was more like a crusade. If they succeeded, people would see that the despised mustang, whom many ranchers had wanted exterminated for years on grounds that they stole the grass from cattle on the public lands, was as good a working horse as any.
    But I kept asking myself why Vidal had wanted me to meet these two guys.
    We walked back to the house to have some lunch.
    In the big kitchen, Will stirred a pot of homemade chili that was simmering on the stove, while Larry made a great big salad. The kitchen was beautiful, with copper pans on the walls. Obviously they both liked to cook, a thing that bachelor cowboys had to make up their minds whether they’d bother with or not.
    “We’ve got homemade bread too,” said Larry proudly. “We bake our own now. We got sick of that cotton store stuff.”
    It was in the kitchen that I started noticing a few things. When I did, I asked myself why I’d been so dense.
    Now that they were indoors, out of sight of the ranch hands, Larry and Will had a different, more intimate way with each other. It wasn’t too obvious —just the way they stood at the counter with their arms touching as they argued about whether the avocados were ripe enough, or the way Will leaned against Larry as he reached up to the spice rack to get the chili powder.
    These two men, who were living together so un-spectacularly, thought of by their neighbors as the usual pair of