The land was his home. Chico said Tar Baby was never frightened. He was a true stallion. He knew it and told it to the birds that helped him eat his oats.
It was a good ranch, I said as I drew.
When the thin rains snipped and the land dried, Chico said, the (lowers came out between the Judas trees, and the old lady's garden bloomed. The Stream water was very clean and cold. Tar Baby loved to bury his nose in it and blow bubbles and hunt frogs and frighten them. The sun was hot overhead every day and the birds hunted in the cool, inky pines.
Everything was hot now, as I worked; in the plain to the south the checker-board lizards and armadillos came our to watch us.
It was amazing, the greenness, Chico said, that came so quickly and gulped so much in a hurry; it knew it could not last, for the big sun was very warm. The stallion grew large; Chico told me the colt burst out into a horse. The dark, wet dorsal streak, smooth as silk, and the springy, sloping pasterns, going quickly over the windy grass, took on form.
The Gauchos admired Tar Baby's wide, high heel and the good concave below it, and rubbed down his oblique shoulders and patted his smooth, free hocks as he flexed them.
Chico said he used to come down early in the morning to run his hands across Tar Baby's square skull and slide fingers along the stifle and the thigh, so strong and long. Tar Baby liked people. He was a good horse, though he was proud; he could enjoy the close contact on the ranch and the glow of the life that went on there.
Sometimes lightning forked in the sky, but he stood still, Chico said, his silky mane and tail showing none of the curl that is the sign of a coarse breed. He flared his large, dilating nos-trils, and he laughed. Yes, laughed, Chico swore; a horse with a sense of humor and the feel of life can laugh.
It wasn't all fun and play. I saw how they trained him. They stopped Tar Baby's kicking when they saddled him. They let him walk along the road a bit before Chico got into the saddle. But it was all right; he liked the boy, and after the first flow of wonder and resentment boiled from him he walked Chico around the road. Then he trotted. knees advancing high. Oh. he knew everything with only a few hints, an old Gaucho said; he remembered from : hundred generations of ancestral horses.
In the local stud ledger they entered his name as Black Nero, but no one eve-called him anything but Tar Baby, and they pulled his car when they said it.
Chico sighed. The years of no water were bad. The flowers still bloomed, bu the time of quick seeding was near. The hills were turning from apple green to olive green; fawn and brown and tan colors were creeping between the rocks and the slopes where the firs in their dark green were not heavy were fading away to soft, sun-washed colors.
The sheep were out to catch the Irs of the green growths; the cows ami steers went picking their pasturage among the foothills, and soon a neutral tone would settle over the range except where the streams and the dams and the deep wells pumped their wetness onto the earth. There, the grass would grow thick.
I finished my drawings and gave Chico one of Tar Baby. He thanked me and said I was much artist.
With many good-bys we left for the mountains. Rollo looked tired and sad. He had been selling his zircons. A zircon looks like a diamond, feels like a diamond, flashes like a diamond, but it isn't a diamond.
Rollo moaned and rubbed an eye. “They gave me a red eye.”
I said, “Why a red eye?”
“Because with my face you can't give me a black eye. So when Emilio, the tall horse breaker, hit me in the face I got a red eye, see?”
I saw. “Why did he hit you?”
“I was kissing his wife and he came and hit me.” He rubbed his eye again.
Uncle Willie laughed. “That's to be expected.”
Mollie nodded. “You mustn't monkey with the wife in this part of the country”.
Rollo moved in discomfort. “That wasn't what bothered Emilio. I had sold him a zircon, and he thought it was a diamond. I hadn't said so. but I hadn't said it wasn't. He showed it to somebody and they said it wasn't a diamond. So he came in and told his wife I was no gentleman and she stepped aside, and poof—he gave me this red eye.”
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