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My weakness for a good horse was the secret of much of my success in ranching during the early days, for with a remuda of seventy picked horses it was impossible for any unowned animal to escape us. Our drag-net scoured the hills and valleys, and before the arrival of the surveyor we had run the "44" on over five hundred calves, mavericks, and wild cattle.
"'Laigs is workin' like they's new oiled, Jim replies back; 'it's a plumb easy game. I reckons, Bill, me an' you could keep ahead of them mavericks a year if we-alls feels like it. "'Bet a blue stack on it, Bill answers. I deems these yere gents soft. Before I'd ride sech ponies as them, I'd go projectin' 'round some night an' steal one.
He held the promise of the Chief for active service, and the men must get ready. On the evening of the same day, Mulcahy, an unconsidered corporal yet great in conspiracy returned to cantonments, and heard sounds of strife and howlings from afar off. The mutiny had broken out and the barracks of the Mavericks were one white-washed pandemonium.
However, no other leader had arisen equal to that masterful spirit, and their enmity expressed itself only in such petty depredations as changing brands on stray cattle from the Bar One and Sweetwater Ranches, and the slitting of the tongues of young calves, so that they would be unable to feed properly, and, as a result, be disowned by their mothers, whereupon the Lazy K outfit would slap its brand on them as mavericks.
"Ye dinna say," said my hostess, looking directly at me over her spectacles, "that Las Palomas branded that mony calves thi' year? Why, durin' ma gudeman's life we alway branded mair calves than did Mr. Lovelace. But then my husband would join the army, and I had tae depend on greasers tae do ma work, and oor kye grew up mavericks."
It's the everlasting truth, though, that them kind of mavericks mostly is a blame sight commoner in parts just opened than the story-book kind that's always so calm-eyed and gentle-natured and generous and brave.
But Shock's days, and most of his nights, even, were spent upon the trail rounding up "strays and mavericks," as Ike said, searching out the lonely bachelor shacks, and lonelier homes where women dwelt whose husbands' days were spent on the range, and whose nearest neighbour might be eight or ten miles away, bringing a touch of the outer world, and leaving a gleam of the light that he carried in his own sunny, honest face.
After you and your lawyers and land office tools have stolen thousands of acres from the government, you talk as if you were an angel out of heaven about the men that brand your mavericks. Hell!" The scorn of the expletive drew from the very depths of furious contempt. "I'd rather stand by a thief that calls himself a thief, than a thief that steals under a lawyer.
"'The mere fact, says Peets to this scientist, 'that you mavericks never knows of this mule-hoof hawg, cannot be taken as proof he does not still root an' roam the land. Thar's more than one of you Washin'ton shorthorns who's chiefly famed for what he's failed to know. The mule-hoof hawg is a fact; an' the ignorance of closet naturalists shall not prevail ag'inst him.
In process of time, thanks to his intimate knowledge of drill and musketry exercise, the excellent Mulcahy, wearing the corporal's stripe, went out in a troopship and joined Her Majesty's Royal Loyal Musketeers, commonly known as the "Mavericks," because they were masterless and unbranded cattle sons of small farmers in County Clare, shoeless vagabonds of Kerry, herders of Ballyvegan, much wanted "moonlighters" from the bare rainy headlands of the south coast, officered by O'Mores, Bradys, Hills, Kilreas, and the like.
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