United States or Niger ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The rolls were made, balanced as side packs, and circled with the swing-ropes, loose cloths, clothes, frying-pans, the lantern, and the axe tossed in to fill the gap in the middle, canvas flung over the whole, and the diamond-hitch hauled taut on the first pack, when a second rider appeared across the river.
They did not know it, and certainly such a thing never occurred to him; all the same, it was a fact. And it grew solely out of the truth that the Englishman was manly in the only way cowboys could have interpreted manliness. When, after innumerable attempts, he succeeded in throwing the diamond-hitch on a pack-horse the cowboys began to respect him.
Evidently I must pack and find the trail. The pony had wandered off into the woods, but was easily caught a fact which lightened my worry, for I knew how dependent I was upon my mustangs. When I had tried for I do not know how long to get my pack to stay on the pony's back I saw where Mr. Cless had played a joke on me. All memory of the diamond-hitch had faded into utter confusion.
When Lennon's very creditable diamond-hitch had been thrown off, the girl overhauled the pack and made quick decisions. "We'll leave most of the flour. You can stock up at the ranch with cornmeal. Same with your cooking outfit. Throw out all but one drill and all the giant powder no, keep half a dozen sticks." "But, Miss Farley, I can't begin to lug a quarter of "
"Expect to drive pack-trains in here for a while." "You must stand strong with these Mormons. Must be a Mormon yerself?" "No," replied Shefford, briefly. "Wal, I'm stuck on your job. Do you need a packer? I can throw a diamond-hitch better 'n any feller in this country." "I don't need help." "Mebbe you'll take me over to see the ladies," he went on, with a coarse laugh.
The hurry order, however, did not interfere with the meal being somewhat in the nature of a picnic. While they ate and talked and laughed the cowboys were packing horses and burros and throwing the diamond-hitch, a procedure so interesting to Castleton that he got up with coffee-cup in hand and tramped from one place to another. "Heard of that diamond-hitch-up," he observed to a cowboy.
"Get a jump on you, then. Miss Messiter, would you like to look over the place?" "Not now. I want to see the men that were hurt. Perhaps I can help them. Once I took a few weeks in nursing." "Bully for you, ma'am," whooped Mac. "I've a notion those boys are sufferin' for a woman to put the diamond-hitch on them bandages."
The bow-line-in-a-bight, the sheet-bend, the clinch-knot, the jam-knot, the fisherman's water-knot, the stevedore's slip-knot, the dock-hand's round-turns and half-hitches for cable makefast, the magnus-hitch, the fool's-knot, the cat's-cradle, the sheep-shank, the dog-shank, and many others all of which I had learned in books and in practise I did for them over and over again; just as I could have done for them a half-dozen different ways of throwing the diamond-hitch in a pack-train, or the stirrup-hitch in a cow camp, or many other of the devices of men who live in the open; for beginning late in life in these things, I had studied them hard and faithfully.
Thar's trains of pack mules freightin' to the gov'ment posts in the Rockies. They figgers on three hundred pounds to the mule an' the freight is packed in panniers. The gov'ment freighters not bein' equal to the manifold mysteries of a diamond-hitch, don't use no reg'lar shore-enough pack saddle but takes refooge with their ignorance in panniers.
Finally, in sheer desperation, I ran round the pony, pulled, tugged, and knotted the lasso; more by luck than through sense I had accomplished something in the nature of the diamond-hitch. I headed Hal up the gentle forest slope, and began the day's journey wherever chance might lead me. As confidence came, my enjoyment increased. I began to believe I could take care of myself.
Word Of The Day