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"A range-horse, you idiot, and a range-saddle. I did ride some on a fancy-gaited steed with a saddle that resembled a porus plaster and stirrups like a lady's bracelet; it didn't fill the aching void a little bit." "Well, maybe yuh won't feel any aching void out here," he said, "but if yuh follow round-up this season you'll sure have plenty of other brands of ache."
"And let me help Dad," said Dave in a low voice. "I want to do all I can for you and the Bar U." Mr. Carson did not reply at once, but he held out his hand and Dave grasped it in a firm clasp. They understood one another. A conference was held, and it was decided that the round-up should be finished as soon as possible, and the cattle intended for shipment driven to the nearest railroad point.
I didn't say anything, either. I stayed at the ranch overnight, intending to start back the next morning. The round-up would be west of where I had left them, according to the foreman or wagon-boss, as he is called. Logically, then, I should take the trail that led through Kenmore, the mining-camp owned by King, and which lay in the heart of White Divide ten miles west of King's Highway.
Try as he would to minimize this exaggerated estimate of his prowess as a horse-tamer Hardy was unable to make his partner admit that he was anything short of a real "buster," and before they had been on the trail an hour Creede had made all the plans for a big gather of wild horses after the round-up.
It was more important to know if you could make yourself useful at a round-up. "'Nother bunch o' them green Eastern horses," grumbled the ranch boss as the lot was turned into a corral. "But that black fellow'd make a rustler's mouth water, eh, Lefty?" In answer to which the said Lefty, being a man little given to speech, grunted. "We'll brand 'em in the mornin'," added the ranch boss.
"We was makin' a round-up down below Separ then, and there was ten of us and the chuck wagon when we made camp at night. Well, one night, Pard Huff, he was scareder than ever, and the boys struck his gait right off and kep' him a-runnin'. I did n't know they was goin' to blaze him quite so bad or I 'd have done my best to stop the thing.
A good bright little soul she was. Saw me through a typhoid trip. Little too clever sometimes," he added, remembering the day when she had taken her fun out of the slow-footed, slow-minded farmer's daughter. "Well," said the Inspector, "we shall possibly come across them in our round-up. This is rather a big game, a very big game and one worth playing."
For Malbrouck followed my trail from the time I began to talk, and in ten minutes he had proved me to be a baby in knowledge, an emaciated baby; he eliminated me from the equation. He first tripped me on the training of naval cadets; then on the Crimea; then on the taking of Quebec; then on the Franco-Prussian War; then, with a sudden round-up, on India.
And in the season of the autumn round-up when the ranchmen of Lincoln County were driving their cattle down out of the breaks into the valley, when their herds were making great crawling patches of brown against the gray of the surrounding landscape, the black-bearded Texan came riding back out of the north.
Whether pure redskin or breed it was impossible for them to tell; certainly there was no visible evidence of a white admixture; but in spite of his strange and savage air, there was something instantly likeable about the young man according to Natalie he was the first native they had met who seemed human. He rode a fine black horse as bravely accoutred as would become the captain of a round-up.
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