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But when the civil service law came in and all the clerks got lead-pipe cinches on their jobs, ingratitude spread right away. Dan shivered and shook till his bones rattled, but many of the city employees only laughed at him. One day, I remember, he tackled a clerk in the Public Works Department, who used to give up pretty regular, and, after the usual question, began to shiver. The clerk smiled.
An' he keeps comin' when I calls, too, or I'd shore burn the ground 'round him to a cinder. I'd be a disgrace to old Tennessee to let my boy Tom go preescribin' what I'm to call him. But they be cur'ous folks! The last time this hirelin' changes his name, I asks the reason. "'Tom, I says, 'this yere is the 'leventh time you cinches on a new name.
The little group of riders, dusty and travel-stained, had come at a steady trot down the street. Stillson, tall, grim-featured, and bronzed, looked neither to the right nor to the left. He stopped, and ordered his men to dismount and eat. They swung out of their saddles without a word, loosening the cinches to breathe their horses. The men of Heart's Desire began to gather around them.
I knew that he was suffering, and that my words were the cause of his agony. I knew that I was prodding him deeply and severely, thrusting the iron into his soul with as little compunction as a Mexican charo exerts when he "cinches" a heavily burdened burro. But I was doing it with malice prepense, and I was doing it for a purpose.
She was glad that it was impossible to return home until the next day. Roberts took the pack off his horse, and then the saddle. And he was bending over in the act of loosening the cinches of Joan's saddle when suddenly he straightened up with a jerk. "What's that?" Joan heard soft, dull thumps on the turf and then the sharp crack of an unshod hoof upon stone. Wheeling, she saw three horsemen.
But in another instant he had leaped to his horse, tested the cinches with trembling fingers, climbed stiffly into the saddle, and dug the spurs into Trixy's flanks. When he looked again toward the ridge, the outlaw had disappeared; but there was no ignis-fatuus trick in that; and the horse would be seen again when Haig too had topped the rise.
And, while Teodoro set a meandering trail, it was not one which a determined pursuer would have too much trouble following, come sunup or whenever that sentry discovered he was guarding a straw prisoner. Once when they pulled up to breathe their horses, dismounting to loose cinches and cool the backs of the mounts, Drew indulged his curiosity further.
Yet nature will not give us pure iron. She always gives it to us mixed with the stuff that weakens it this dross and brimstone. Nature hands out no bonanzas, no lead-pipe cinches to mankind. Man must claw for everything he gets, and when he gets it, it is mixed with dirt. And if he wants it clean, he'll have to clean it with the labor of his hands. "Why can't we have a different system than this?"
He stepped closer to the saddle, tested the cinches and spoke to Kate: "It's a hard ride. You can make it by letting the horse strictly alone. I'll lead him but he won't stand two bosses in this kind of a mess, over the only trail that leads from here. How you ever got in, God only knows, and He won't tell leastways, not tonight. Sit tight. Don't get scared no matter what happens.
Shivering with cold, the Texan raised himself to a sitting posture. "Where's Bat?" he asked. "An' why ain't he onsaddled those horses, an' built a fire? I'm froze stiff." "Bat has gone to to find Winthrop," answered the girl, with a painful catch in her voice. "He wouldn't wait, and I had no matches, and yours were all wet, and I couldn't loosen the cinches."
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