A Chinaman does not grab the bit of a broncho and yank it around till
the noble beast can see thirteen new and peculiar kinds of fire-works,
or kick him in the stomach, or knock his ribs loose, or swear at him
until the firmament gets loose and begins to roll together like a
scroll, but he gets on the wrong side and slides into the saddle and
smiles and says something like what a guinea hen would say if she got
excited and tried to repeat one of Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson's poems
backward in his native tongue. At first the broncho seems temporarily
rattled, but by-and-by he shoots athwart the sunny sky like a thing of
life and comes down with his legs in a cluster like a bunch of
asparagus.
This will throw a Chinaman's liver into the northwest corner of his
throat, and his upper left hand duodessimo into the middle of next week,
but he doesn't complain. He opens his mouth and breaths in all of the
atmosphere the rest of the universe can spare, and tickles the broncho
on the starboard quarter with his cork sole. The mirth-provoking
movement throws the broncho into the wildest hysterics, and for some
minutes the spectator doesn't see anything very distinctly. The autumnal
twilight seems fraught with blonde broncho and pale-blue shirt tail and
Chinaman moving in an irregular orbit, and occasionally throwing off
meteoric articles of apparel and pre-historic chunks of ingenious
profanity of the vintage of Confucius. When the sky clears up a little
the Chinaman's hair is down and in wild profusion about his olive
features. His shirt flap is very much frayed, like an American flag that
has snapped in the breeze for thirteen weeks.
He finds also that he has telescoped his spinal column and jammed two
ribs through the right superior duplex, has two or three vertebrae
floating about through his system that he doesn't know what to do with.
In fact, the Chinaman is a robust ruin, while the broncho is still in a
good state of preservation. Now the broncho humps his back up into a
circumambient atmosphere, and when he once bisects the earth's orbit and
jabs his feet into the trembling earth a shapeless mass of brocaded silk
and coarse black hair and taper nails and celestial shirt-tails and
oolong profanity and disorganized Chinese remains comes down apparently
from the New Jerusalem, and the coroner goes out on the street to get
six good men and a chemist, and they analyze the collection. They report
that the deceased had come to his death by reasons of concussion,
induced by a ride from the outer battlements of the sweet by-and-by.