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"One tree is as good as another," Harry answered in a strangely quiet voice. In the midst of an impressive silence, and with motions that seemed oddly unreal to the tended victims, Duff placed the two young engineers. A lariat was thrown over a low limb of each of the trees. Then, with slightly trembling hands the gambler adjusted a over the neck of each bound boy.
If it was a pocketknife, it doubtless would be dull, as pocketknives usually are, and therefore useless. With any pressure that she might be able to command, a keen cutting edge would be necessary to free her from the coils of the lariat. By now she had regained her strength, and once more began wriggling and worming until her eyes were close to the blade, half hidden by pine needles.
The unnatural mothers who deny their children are caught, with a lariat by a Mexican, with a crook by a Yankee, and confined in separate little pens alone with their lambs. If necessary to compel them to acknowledge their maternal responsibilities, they are kept in solitary confinement two days, without food.
Two were playing cards, and two were engaged in taking a drink from a whisky flask, one of these being the man Blacksnake had sent inside. The two prisoners Lefty Warren and young Morton were securely bound in lariat rope, sitting against one wall. The Kid saw their eyes light up as they recognized him. Evidently they had not expected to see him again alive.
As the bull charged, Ted's rope was seen to leave his hand and go sailing through the air in graceful loops and curves that lengthened out one after the other. One of the most difficult throws a cow-puncher can make with a lariat was that which Ted attempted. He had to calculate to a degree the speed with which the bull was advancing toward him, and that at which the rope was leaving him.
"I won't mind the ride. But can you boys take care of yourselves while I am gone?" "To be sure we can," answered Dave. "Then I'll take three of the deer with me and come back as soon as I can. One deer will be all you will need," answered Sid Todd. To get the deer from the cliff they had to use a long lariat the cowboy had brought with him. By this means the game was hoisted to the hilltop.
Here he pushed back the bed which he had drawn over the hole in the floor, dropped his two sacks through into the bank, and tying the brace to one end of the lariat lowered it through after the sacks. Looping the middle of the lariat over a bedpost Billy grasped both strands firmly and lowered himself through the aperture into the room beneath.
Frenzied as I was with excitement, the thought occurred to me that this was an unfair battle, that I ought to stand aside and let him pass. But the blood and lust of primitive instinct held me fast. Jones, keeping back, met his every turn. Yet always with lithe and beautiful stride the stallion kept out of reach of the whirling lariat.
He had been reared on a farm; he had handled horses, understood them, and could ride. Approaching slowly and speaking soothingly, he followed the animal, which, after its first flight, seemed gentle enough, and secured the end of the twenty-foot lariat that dragged after him in the grass.
His special glory consisted in a complicated whirling of the lariat. In his hand the limp, inert cord took on life, grace, charm. It hung in the air or ran in rhythmic waves about him, rising, falling, expanding, diminishing, as if controlled by some agency other than a man's hand, and its gyrations had won much applause in the Eastern cities, where such skill is expected of the cowboys.
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