He was riding onward abstractedly, with his head sunk on his breast and his eyes fixed upon some vague point between his horse's sensitive ears, when a sudden, intelligent, forward pricking of them startled him, and an apparition arose from the plain before him that seemed to sweep all other sense away.
It was the figure of a handsome young horseman as abstracted as himself, but evidently on better terms with his own personality.

He was dark haired, sallow cheeked, and blue eyed,--the type of the old Spanish Californian.

A burnt-out cigarette was in his mouth, and he was riding a roan mustang with the lazy grace of his race.

But what arrested Clarence's attention more than his picturesque person was the narrow, flexible, long coil of gray horse-hair riata which hung from his saddle-bow, but whose knotted and silver-beaded terminating lash he was swirling idly in his narrow brown hand.

Clarence knew and instantly recognized it as the ordinary fanciful appendage of a gentleman rider, used for tethering his horse on lonely plains, and always made the object of the most lavish expenditure of decoration and artistic skill.