With their mixed ancestry, it was inevitable that some of the wild horses were born runts or splayfooted or swaybacked or too heavy-hocked to do anything but pull a manure wagon. But now and then, all that blood would get shook up just right and you’d get a horse like the black, who was a little bit of everything and a whole lot of himself. He was enormous for a mustang, around seventeen hands and twelve hundred pounds, and he had a shaggy coat and hooves the size of dinner plates. Some accounts said he had a lopsided diamond between the eyes and others say it looked more like a cross. The black had one white stocking, the left rear, and there are those who imagine him as one of those glossy black stallions you see in the motion pictures. Truth is, the black was ugly as a porcupine’s behind. He had that big Roman nose, he’d never seen a currycomb in his life, he had battle scars all over his chest and head from fighting off other stallions and his face was so wide a big man could lay an entire hand between his eyes. He might not even have been black. In a certain light, they say, he looked more like a dark bay, a horse possessed of some deep blood color mixed with black that was so unusual wranglers preferred to refer to him as the black to avoid the suggestion that he was indeed a spirit horse not from this earth.

What intrigued the horse hunters who pursued him was not his beauty but the muscle in that deep chest and bowed neck and those powerful hindquarters, the intelligence in the wide-set eyes, the unexpected speed when he decided to run, the agility and endurance he displayed along with a ferocity that even the most experienced hands had never seen. It was generally agreed that the man who could tame the black would have the finest mount in Wyoming and possibly the entire United States of America—but that it might be easier to slip a snaffle bit on a mountain lion.