Death-on-the-trail Carson formed themselves into a committee of three to
ameliorate the monotony.
They were a picturesque trio. Carson was a sombre individual,
architecturally resembling a leafless gaunt-limbed pine, for he lacked
but a scant half inch of being seven feet of bone and whip-cord.
Years before he had gone out over the trail that wound among sage bush
and pink-flowered ball cactus up into the Bitter Root Mountains with
"Irish" Fagan. Months after he came back alone; more sombre, more gaunt,
more sparing of speech, and had offered casually the statement that
"Fagan met death on the trail." This laconic epitome of a gigantic
event had crystallized into a moniker for Carson, and he became solely
"Death-on-the-trail."
Snaggle Tooth Boone had a wolf-like fang on the very doorstep of his
upper jaw, so it required no powerful inventive faculty to rechristen
him with aptitude.
Blake was not only iron-jawed physically, but all his dealings were of
the bullheaded order; finesse was as foreign to Iron Jaw as caviare to a
Siwash.
So this triumvirate of decorative citizens, with Iron Jaw as penman,
wrote to Reilly at Portland, Oregon, to send in a horse good enough
to beat Clatawa, and a jock to ride him. Iron Jaw's directions were
specific, lengthy; going into detail. He knew that a thoroughbred,
even a selling plater, would be good enough to take the measure of any
cross-bred horse, no matter how good the latter apparently was, running
in scrub races. He also knew the value of weight as a handicap, and the
Walla Walla races were all matches, catch-weights up. So he wrote to
Reilly to send him a tall, slim rider who could pad up with clothes and
look the part of an able-bodied cow puncher.
It was a pleasing line of endeavor to Reilly--he just loved that sort
of thing; trimming "come-ons" was right in his mitt. He fulfilled the
commission to perfection, sending up, by the flat river steamer, the
_Maid of Palouse,_ what appeared to be an ordinary black ranch cow-pony
in charge of "Texas Sam," a cow puncher. From Lewiston, the head of
navigation, Texas Sam rode his horse behind the old Concord coach over
the twenty-five miles of trail to Walla Walla.
The endeavor had gone through with swift smoothness. Nobody but Iron
Jaw, Death-on-the-trail, and Snaggle Tooth knew of the possibilities
that lurked in the long chapp-legged Texas Jim and the thin rakish black
horse that he called Horned Toad.
As one spreads bait as a decoy, Sam was given money to flash, and
instructed in the art of fool talk.
Iron Jaw was banker in this game; while Snaggle Tooth ran the wheel and
faro lay-out in the Del Monte saloon. So, when Texas dribbled a thousand
dollars across the table, "bucking the tiger," it was show money; a
thousand that Iron Jaw had passed him earlier in the evening, and which
Snaggle Tooth would pass back to its owner in the morning.