against it once more, should opportunity offer, Corazón followed the
buster quietly enough when he rode out into the open. Beside a sturdy
mesquite bush that grew apart from its brethren, Mullins dismounted and
tied the sorrel. As a farewell he waved his arms and whooped. Of course
Corazón gathered himself and leaped--leaped to the utmost that was in
him, so that the bush vibrated to its farthest root; and of course he
hit the earth with a jarring thump that temporarily paralyzed him.
Mullins departed to put the thrall of human will on others.
Throughout the afternoon, and time after time during the interminable
night, the sorrel tried to break away, but with each sickening failure
he grew more cautious. When he ran against the rope now, he did not run
blindly to its limit, but half wheeled, so that when it jerked him back
he invariably landed on his feet. Corazón was learning hard, but he was
learning. And what agonies of pain and suspense he went through!--for
years a free rover, and now to be bound thus, by what looked to be a
mere thread, for he knew not what further tortures! He sweated and
shivered, seeing peril in every shadow. When a coyote slunk by with
tongue lapping hungrily over his teeth, the prisoner almost broke his
neck in a despairing struggle to win freedom.
In the chill of the dawn they led him into a circular corral. His
sleekness had departed; the barrel-like body did not look so well
nourished, and there was red in the blazing eyes.
“I reckon he’ll be mean,” observed the buster, as though it concerned
him but little.
“No-o-o. Go easy with him, Carl, and I think he’ll make a good hoss,”
the boss cautioned.
While two men held the rope, Mullins advanced along it foot by foot,
inch by inch, one hand outstretched, and talked to Corazón in a low,
careless tone of affectionate banter. “So you’d like for to kill me,
would you?” he inquired, grinning. All the while he held the sorrel’s
gaze.
Corazón stood still, legs planted wide apart, and permitted him to
approach. He trembled when the fingers touched his nose; but they were
firm, confident digits, the voice was reassuring, and the gentle rubbing
up, up between the eyes and ears lulled his forebodings.
“Hand me the blanket,” said Mullins.
He drew it softly over Corazón’s back, and the broncho swerved, pawed,
and kicked with beautiful precision. Whereupon they placed a rope around
his neck, dropped it behind his right hind leg, then pulled that member
up close to his belly; there it was held fast. On three legs now, the
sorrel was impotent for harm. Mullins once more took up the blanket but
this time the gentleness had flown. He slapped it over Corazón’s
backbone from side to side a dozen times. At each impact the horse
humped awkwardly, but, finding that he came to no hurt, he suffered it
in resignation.
That much of the second lesson learned, they saddled him. Strangely
enough, Corazón submitted to the operation without fuss, the only
untoward symptoms being a decided upward slant to the back of the saddle
and the tucking of his tail. Reb waggled his head over this exhibition.
“I don’t like his standing quiet that away; it ain’t natural,” he
vouchsafed. “Look at the crick in his back. Jim-in-ee! he’ll shore
pitch.”
Which he did. The cinches were tightened until Corazón’s eyes almost
popped from his head; then they released the bound leg and turned him
loose. What was that galling his spine? Corazón took a startled peep at
it, lowered his head between his knees, and began to bawl. Into the air
he rocketed, his head and forelegs swinging to the left, his hind
quarters weaving to the right. The jar of his contact with the ground
was appalling. Into the air again, his head and forelegs to the right,
his rump twisted to the left. Round and round the corral he went,
blatting like an angry calf; but the thing on his back stayed where it
was, gripping his body cruelly. At last he was fain to stop for breath.
“Now,” said Mullins, “I reckon I’ll take it out of him.”
There has always been for me an overwhelming fascination in watching
busters at work. They have underlying traits in common when it comes to
handling the horses--the garrulous one becomes coldly watchful, the
Stoic moves with stern patience, the boaster soothes with soft-crooned
words and confident caress. Mullins left Corazón standing in the middle
of the corral, the hackamore rope strung loose on the ground, while he
saw to it that his spurs were fast. We mounted the fence, not wishing to
be mixed in the glorious turmoil to follow.
“I wouldn’t top ol’ Corazón for fifty,” confessed the man on the
adjoining post.
“Mullins has certainly got nerve,” I conceded.
“A buster has got to have nerve.” The range boss delivered himself
laconically. “All nerve and no brains makes the best. But they get stove
up and then--”
“And then? What then?”
“Why, don’t you know?” he asked in surprise. “Every buster loses his
nerve at last, and then they can’t ride a pack-hoss. It must be because
it’s one fool man with one set of nerves up ag’in a new hoss with a new
devil in him every time. They wear him down. Don’t you reckon?”
The explanation sounded plausible. Mullins was listening with a faintly
amused smile to Reb’s account of what a lady mule had done to him; he
rolled a cigarette and lighted it painstakingly. The hands that held the
match were steady as eternal rock. It was maddening to see him stand
there so coolly while the big sorrel, a dozen feet distant, was a-quake
with dread, blowing harshly through his crimson nostrils whenever a
cowboy stirred--and each of us knowing that the man was taking his life
in his hands. An unlooked-for twist, a trifling disturbance of poise,
and, with a horse like Corazón, it meant maiming or death. At last he
threw the cigarette from him and walked slowly to the rope.
“So you’re calling for me?” he inquired, gathering it up.
Corazón was snorting. By patient craft Reb acquired a grip on the
sorrel’s ears, and, while he hung there, bringing the head down so that
the horse could not move, Mullins tested the stirrups and raised himself
cautiously into the saddle.
“Let him go.”
While one could count ten, Corazón stood expectant, his back bowed, his
tail between his legs. The ears were laid flat on the head and the
forefeet well advanced. The buster waited, the quirt hanging from two
fingers of his right hand. Suddenly the sorrel ducked his head and
emitted a harsh scream, leaping, with legs stiff, straight off the
ground. He came down with the massive hips at an angle to the shoulders,
thereby imparting a double shock; bounded high again, turned back with
bewildering speed as he touched the earth; and then, in a circle perhaps
twenty feet in diameter, sprang time after time, his heels lashing the
air. Never had such pitching been seen on the Anvil Range.
“I swan, he just misses his tail a’ inch when he turns back!” roared a
puncher.
Mullins sat composedly in the saddle, but he was riding as never before.
He whipped the sorrel at every jump and raked him down the body from
shoulder to loins with the ripping spurs. The brute gave no signs of
letting up. Through Mullins’ tan of copper hue showed a slight pallor.
He was exhausted. If Corazón did not give in soon, the man would be
beaten. Just then the horse stopped, feet a-sprawl.
“Mullins,”--the range boss got down from the fence,--“you’ll kill that
hoss. Between the cinches belongs to you; the head and hind quarters is
the company’s.”
For a long minute Mullins stared at the beast’s ears without replying.
“I reckon that’s the rule,” he acquiesced heavily. “Do you want that
somebody else should ride him?”
“No-o-o. Go ahead. But, remember, between the cinches you go at him as
you like--nowhere else.”
[Illustration: “_Leaping, with legs stiff, straight off the ground_”]
The buster slapped the quirt down on Corazón’s shoulder, but the broncho
did not budge; then harder. With the first oath he had used, he jabbed
in the spurs and lay back on the hackamore rope. Instead of bucking,
Corazón reared straight up, his feet pawing like the hands of a drowning
man. Before Mullins could move to step off, the sorrel flung his head
round and toppled backward.
“No, he’s not dead.” The range boss leaned over the buster and his hands
fumbled inside the shirt. “The horn got him here, but he ain’t dead.
Claude, saddle Streak and hit for Agua Prieta for the doctor.”
When we had carried the injured man to the bunk-house, Reb spoke from
troubled meditation:
“Pete, I don’t believe Corazón is as bad as he acts with Mullins. I’ve
been watching him. Mullins, he didn’t--”
“You take him, then; he’s yours,” snapped the boss, his conscience
pricking because of the reproof he had administered. If the buster had
ridden him his own way, this might not have happened.
That is how the sorrel came into Reb’s possession. Only one man of the
outfit witnessed the taming, and he would not talk; but when Reb came to
dinner from the first saddle on Corazón, his hands were torn and the
nail of one finger hung loose.
“I had to take to the horn and hang on some,” he admitted.
Ay, he had clung there desperately while the broncho pitched about the
river-bed, whither Reb had retired for safety and to escape spectators.
But at the next saddle Corazón was less violent; at the third,
recovering from the stunning shocks and bruisings of the first day, he
was a fiend; and then, on the following morning, he did not pitch at
all. Reb rode him every day to sap the superfluous vigor in Corazón’s
iron frame and he taught him as well as he could the first duties of a
cowhorse. Finding that his new master never punished him unless he
undertook to dispute his authority, the sorrel grew tractable and began
to take an interest in his tasks.
“He’s done broke,” announced Reb; “I’ll have him bridle-wise in a week.
He’ll make some roping horse. Did you see him this evening? I swan--”
They scoffed good-naturedly; but Reb proceeded on the assumption that
Corazón was meant to be a roping horse, and schooled him accordingly. As
for the sorrel, he took to the new pastime with delight. Within a month
nothing gave him keener joy than to swerve and crouch at the climax of a
sprint and see a cow thrown heels over head at the end of the rope that
was wrapped about his saddle-horn.
The necessity of contriving to get three meals a day took me elsewhere,
and I did not see Corazón again for three years. Then, one Sunday
afternoon, Big John drew me from El Paso to Juarez on the pretense of
seeing a grand, an extraordinary, a most noble bull-fight, in which the
dauntless Favorita would slay three fierce bulls from the renowned El
Carmen ranch, in “competency” with the fearless Morenito Chico de San
Bernardo; and a youth with a megaphone drew us both to a steer-roping
contest instead. We agreed that bull-fighting was brutal on the Sabbath.
“I’ll bet it’s rotten,” remarked Big John pessimistically, as we took
our seats. “I could beat ’em myself.”
As he scanned the list, his face brightened. Among the seventeen ropers
thereon were two champions and a possible new one in Raphael Fraustro,
the redoubtable vaquero from the domain of Terrazas.
“And here’s Reb!” roared John--he is accustomed to converse in the
tumult of the branding-pen--“I swan, he’s entered from Monument.”
Shortly afterwards the contestants paraded, wonderfully arrayed in silk
shirts and new handkerchiefs.
“Some of them ain’t been clean before in a year,” was John’s caustic
comment. “There’s Slim; I KNOW he hasn’t.”
They were a fine-looking body of men, and two of my neighbors complained
that I trampled on their feet. The horses caught the infection of
excitement from the packed stands and champed on their bits and
caracoled and waltzed sideways in a manner highly unbecoming a staid
cow-pony.
There was one that did not. So sluggish was his gait and general
bearing, in contrast to the others, that the crowd burst into laughter.
He plodded at the tail-end of the procession, his hoofs kicking up the
dust in listless spurts, his nose on a level with his knees. I rubbed my
eyes and John said, “No, it ain’t--it can’t be--”; but it was. Into that
arena slouched Corazón, entered against the pick of the horses of the
Southwest; and Reb was astride him.
We watched the ropers catch and tie the steers in rapid succession, but
the much-heralded ones missed altogether, and to John and me the
performance lagged. We were waiting for Reb and Corazón.
They came at last, at the end of the list. When Corazón ambled up the
arena to enter behind the barrier, the grandstand roared a facetious
welcome; the spectacle of this sad-gaited nag preparing to capture a
steer touched its risibilities.
“Listen to me,” bawled a fat gentleman in a wide-brimmed hat, close to
my ear. “You listen to me! They’re all fools. That’s a cowhorse. No
blasted nonsense. Knows his business, huh? You’re damn whistlin’!”
Assuredly, Corazón knew his business. The instant he stepped behind the
line he was a changed horse. The flopping ears pricked forward, his neck
arched, and the great muscles of his shoulders and thighs rippled to his
dainty prancing. He pulled and fretted on the bit, his eyes roving about
in search of the quarry; he whinnied an appeal to be gone. Reb made
ready his coil, curbing him with light pressure.
Out from the chute sprang a steer, heading straight down the arena.
Corazón was frantic. With the flash of the gun he breasted the
barrier-rope and swept down on him in twenty strides. Reb stood high in
the stirrups; the loop whirled and sped; and, without waiting to see how
it fell, but accepting a catch in blind faith, the sorrel started off at
a tangent.
Big John was standing up in his place, clawing insanely at the hats of
his neighbors and banging them on the head with his programme.
“Look at him--just look at him!” he shrieked.
The steer was tossed clear of the ground and came down on his left side.
Almost before he landed, Reb was out of the saddle and speeding toward
him.
“He’s getting up. HE’S GETTING UP. Go to him, Reb!” howled John and I.
The steer managed to lift his head; he was struggling to his knees. I
looked away, for Reb must lose. Then a hoarse shout from the multitude
turned back my gaze. Corazón had felt the slack on the rope and knew
what it meant. He dug his feet into the dirt and began to walk slowly
forward--very slowly and carefully, for Reb’s task must not be spoiled.
The steer collapsed, falling prone again, but the sorrel did not stop.
Once he cocked his eye, and seeing that the animal still squirmed,
pulled with all his strength. The stands were rocking; they were a sea
of tossing hats and gesticulating arms and flushed faces; the roar of
their plaudits echoed back from the hills. And it was all for Corazón,
gallant Corazón.
“Dam’ his eyes--dam’ his ol’ eyes!” Big John babbled over and over,
absolutely oblivious.
Reb stooped beside the steer, his hands looping and tying with deft
darting twists even as he kept pace with his dragged victim.
“I guess it’s--about--a--hour,” he panted.
Then he sprang clear and tossed his hands upward, facing the judges’
stand. After that he walked aimlessly about, mopping his face with a
handkerchief; for to him the shoutings and the shifting colors were all
a foolish dream, and he was rather sick.
Right on the cry with which his master announced his task done, Corazón
eased up on the rope and waited.
“Mr. Pee-ler’s time,” bellowed the man with the megaphone presently, “is
twenty-one seconds, ty-ing the world’s re-cord.”
So weak that his knees trembled, Reb walked over to his horse.
“Corazón,” he said huskily, and slapped him once on the flank.
Nothing would do the joyous crowd then but that Reb should ride forth to
be acclaimed the victor. We sat back and yelled ourselves weak with
laughter, for Corazón, having done his work, refused resolutely to
squander time in vain parade. The steer captured and tied, he had no
further interest in the proceedings. The rascal dog-trotted reluctantly
to the center of the arena in obedience to Reb, then faced the audience;
but, all the time Reb was bowing his acknowledgments, Corazón sulked and
slouched, and he was sulking and shuffling the dust when they went
through the gate.
“Now,” said John, who is very human, “we’ll go help Reb spend that
money.”
As we jostled amid the outgoing crowd, several cowboys came alongside
the grandstand rail, and Big John drew me aside to have speech with
them. One rider led a spare horse and when he passed a man on foot, the
latter hailed him:
“Say, Ed, give me a lift to the hotel?”
“Sure,” answered Ed, proffering the reins.
The man gathered them up, his hands fluttering as if with palsy, and
paused with his foot raised toward the stirrup.
“He won’t pitch nor nothing, Ed?” came the quavered inquiry. “You’re
shore he’s gentle?”
“Gentler’n a dog,” returned Ed, greatly surprised.
“You ain’t fooling me, now, are you, Ed?” continued the man on the
ground. “He looks kind of mean.”
“Give him to me!” Ed exploded. “You kin walk.”
From where we stood, only the man’s back was visible. “Who is that
fellow?” I asked.
“Who? Him?” answered my neighbor. “Oh, his name’s Mullins. They say he
used to be able to ride anything with hair on it, and throw off the
bridle at that. I expect that’s just talk. Don’t you reckon?”
IV
THE OUTLAW
Steve was recounting an episode of Hell’s Acre.
“And jist as I was fighting my horse to make him go through that
scrub-oak, he done stubbed his toe in the sand. Up she come with a
whoof--one of them ol’ long-horns. That cow had hid herself there. Yes,
sir; but she didn’t quite git her horns covered.”
Reb said he could well believe it. No longer ago than last Tuesday,
while chasing some stubborn cattle, he had chanced upon a cow lying flat
behind a bush. A jackrabbit was burying her under leaves, for better
concealment.
Whereupon the two got to horse and rode away, leaving behind them a
thoughtful silence.
There was a water-gap to be repaired and they headed for the Salt Fork
of the Brazos.
“Wait a minute,” said Steve. “Look there.”
A cow stood on the crest of a rise--a lean, dun creature, with distended
eyes. When they approached, she trotted off to the right, mumbling
anxiously. They did not follow. Then she stopped, her head erect and
nostrils dilated, to watch them. The two ambled forward and she kept
near, very, very anxious.
“She’s got a calf hid out somewheres,” Reb remarked.
He surveyed the immediate country leisurely, confident of what he would
discover. Two hundred yards in front was a patch of mesquite, and they
made for it. Behind a bush they found the calf--a sturdy, red-and-white
baby with a specially black, moist nose. It flattened out when Steve
stood over it.
“Git up,” he commanded, “I want to see more of you. I bet them hoofs of
yours is soft.”
The calf hugged the ground. He raised the sagging body by the brisket
and tail, none too gently. When he let go, the little fellow collapsed,
spread out like a jellyfish. He must have marveled as he lay there,
rolling his wide, questioning eyes upward, what strange beings these
were, for he was just one day old and had never seen a man.
“Come a li’l’ seven,” Steve cried joyously. “Look a-here, Reb. See his
face.”
Between the youngster’s eyes was a crimson splash which made a perfect
7. Reb examined the peculiar marking with interest and suggested that
Come-a-Seven might bring the little devil luck as a name.
The calf resented all this handling and raised his voice in a plaintive
bawl. As they loped away on their errand, the cow crashed through the
bushes to her offspring’s side. She nosed him solicitously, rumbling
caresses.
Come-a-Seven inherited all the hardiness of his race--indeed, in later
years, Reb vowed that he was tougher’n the oldest man in the world. Half
an hour after his advent into this vale of tears he could walk. It was
not a gait to justify boasting, because his forelegs showed a tendency
to give at unexpected places, but he saved himself from a fall by
leaning against his mother’s shoulder. He next made the circuit of the
cow twice in a clumsy hunt for the fount of his food supply and finally
reached it in an extremely awkward position. Nevertheless, she watched
him pridefully, her sight blurred with happiness; and braced against her
hind leg, he fed like a glutton. Feeling full and reckless therefrom, he
humped his back in abandon and tried to cavort, but came down with a
jarring thump.
The young mother did her duty by him like a Scotch washerwoman with nine
children. He breakfasted at dawn--drank until he could drink no more.
Afterwards she went off to graze, leaving the calf behind some screening
hush. It was seldom she strayed so far that she was not within sight or
call: there is danger to toddling calves that lie out on the range
unprotected.
How fast his strength grew! At five days of age he could have butted
into a wooden fence at half-speed without any especially ill effects,
save to the fence. Yet his mother’s care never abated. She would go over
him every night with eager tenderness and was ever aggressively on the
alert to defend. For she would have fought anything on four legs for the
life of that loose-jointed, red-and-white blatherskite she held to be
prince of his race.
The cattle grazed in scattered bunches over some hundred thousand acres
of the east range--they are not so companionable as horses and do not
herd so closely in their feeding. Nor will the bulls take such
responsibilities upon their shoulders as do stallions with the mares and
colts. Come-a-Seven, in fact, never saw his father, to his knowledge.
That ponderous, morose scion of Hereford stock lived his own life in his
own way, spending half the day sleeping in the shade of a cottonwood;
and he did not worry about family matters. His scores of children might
fare as best they could. In the meantime he had his amusements. Besides,
what on earth were their mothers for?
On his eighth day Come-a-Seven started out to see something of the
world. No great variety offered within his ken--a rolling expanse,
green-gray, gashed by numerous brick-red gullies; hundreds of scraggy
mesquite bushes and some prickly-pear; two or three regal cottonwoods on
the bank of a creek, whose sandy bed was a third of a mile wide; beyond,
a butte lifting from the earth like a monstrous mushroom. That was what
he saw--that, and big blue blotches of shadows moving over the country
like an army of specters. Piles of tumbled white clouds gave promise of
rain at a later date.
Upon this the red-and-white gazed, his head moving from side to side in
jerks, ears twitching, tail straight out as when he fed. He was trying
to get up nerve to sally farther afield. As a starter and a spur to
courage he curveted clumsily, but was brought up short by the sight of
another calf of about his own age, standing not a dozen yards away,
surveying him with the liveliest interest. Come-a-Seven tried to look
hostile, even threatening, but his curiosity got the better of him,
because the calf into whose face he glared had the merest stump of a
tail.
Advancing a step, he intimated in his own peculiar, gruff calf-manner
that the abbreviated member puzzled him. If Come-a-Seven had ever dodged
a coyote, he would not have been so ignorant. The other evinced no
resentment and they approached in amicable fashion, made a playful butt
at each other and became fast friends. After that they would loaf about
together in the hot summer days, making trouble for the other calves and
stirring up bickerings and feuds.
None of them was of a serious nature. The nearest approach to a tragic
ending happened when the red-and-white smashed, full tilt, into a
six-months’-old half-brother, of whose relationship he was ignorant--not
that this would have made any difference--and knocked him off the steep
wall of a tank into the water. He had to run at that, for the other was
a husky, ardent calf, and he was angry all through. When he scrambled
out, he went hunting for the red-and-white, but by that time the
offender was safely under his mother’s eye, which fact he flaunted
brazenly.