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Simple he was, sitting there on top of that hammering old cattle car that sunny afternoon, the dust of the road in his three-day-old beard, his barked willow prod-pole between his knees; simple as a ballad that children sing, simple as a homely tune. Well, of course he had kept Grace Kerr's little handkerchief, for reasons that he could not quite define.
But some instinct warned him that unless he wanted to break with Crawford completely he must restrain his impulse to rip loose. "All right," he mumbled. "If you told him to get 'em, 'nough said." Dave stood on the fence of one of the shipping pens at the Albuquerque stockyards and used a prod-pole to guide the bawling cattle below.
The next morning every lad armed himself with a prod-pole long as a lance and tipped with a sharp steel brad, and we commenced regathering. Thereafter we corralled them at night, which always called for a free use of ropes, as a number usually broke away on approaching the pens.
Sitting there on top of a car, his prod-pole between his knees, in his high-heeled boots and old dusty hat, the Duke was a typical figure of the old-time cow-puncher such as one never meets in these times around the stockyards of the Middle West. There are still cow-punchers, but they are mainly mail-order ones who would shy from a gun such as pulled down on Lambert's belt that day.
The lean Arizona-born youth slid from the fence on his prod-pole and stepped forward till he stood beside the buckboard of the cattleman. "I'm the man you're lookin' for, Mr. West." The owner of the Fifty-Four Quarter Circle brand looked him over with keen eyes around which nets of little wrinkles spread. "What man?" he asked. "The one to help Mr. Garrison take the cattle to Denver."
A pair of horsemen would double on the deserter, and with a prod-pole to his ear and the pressure of a man and horse bearing their weight on the same, a circle would be covered and Toro always reëntered the day-herd. One such lesson was usually sufficient, and by reaching corrals every night and penning them, we managed, after two weeks' hard work, to land them in the stockyards at Fort Worth.
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