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Updated: September 11, 2025
Accordingly the nearest cowboy clapped spurs to his horse and pursued them. It was a pretty race. The cattle ran easily enough, with long, springy jumps that carried them over the ground faster than appearances would lead one to believe. The cow-pony, his nose stretched out, his ears slanted, his eyes snapping with joy of the chase, flew fairly "belly to earth."
Down to the edge of the town he rode, left his cow-pony standing with hanging head outside a saloon, strode through the swinging doors, and asked of the bartender the way to the house of Martin Ryder.
The rhythmic stride of a running horse came to him not the quick patter of a cow-pony, but the long, sweeping stride of a racer. Then out of the night burst a rider on a foam-flecked horse that reared almost into the gate, which Pete unlooped and dragged back. "That you, Brevoort?" called the horseman. "He's at the shack," Pete shouted, as the other swept past.
The cheapest Western cow-pony may look like the cartoon of a horse, but he has points which a judge will note, and he will run a picture horse to death in three days. Such were the horses which took the trail of Satan and they were chosen specimens of their kind. Up the slope they stormed and there went Satan skimming across the hollow beneath them.
Pete surmised that it would be dark long before they reached their destination. Incidentally he was amazed by the speed of the thoroughbreds, who ran so easily, yet with a long, reaching stride that ate into the miles. To Pete they seemed more like excellent machines than horses lacking the pert individuality of the cow-pony.
She had two horses, also. One of them was an ordinary "cow-pony," but the other was a big black Spanish horse who seemed to love Martha as well as she loved him. When she was on his back he never varied his long, swinging, graceful gallop by jumping or shying, but if any one else rode him, he was apt to make them hold fast when he went around corners. His name was "Dan."
The air was bright and crisp, and though so late, there was neither snow nor frost. The Horses were fresh, and once or twice showed me how a Cow-pony tries to get rid of his rider. The Dogs were keen for sport, and we did start one or two gray spots in the plain that Hilton said were Wolves or Coyotes.
At the end of a week Terry won a bet when a team of draught horses hitched onto his line could not pull El Sangre over his mark, and broke the rope instead. There was much work, too, in teaching him to turn in the cow-pony fashion, dropping his head almost to the ground and bunching his feet altogether. For nothing of its size that lives is so deft in dodging as the cow-pony.
He was wet to the skin and bespattered with mud; he had been almost constantly in the saddle for twenty-four hours, and Don Ricardo's cow-pony was almost exhausted. Blaze and Paloma, of course, were tremendously interested in his story. "Say, now, that's quick work," the latter exclaimed, heartily.
To this end he told her lively anecdotes, chaste classics of the range calculated to amuse, until they reached the very door of home: About the British sailor who, having drifted up the Sacramento valley, was lured to mount a cow-pony known to be hysterical; of how he had declared when they picked him up a moment later, "If I'd been aware of the gale I'd have lashed myself to the rigging."
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