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Ted and Stella rode in the lead as they entered the town, which was crowded with a motley assemblage of cow-punchers, gamblers, and Indians in their gay blankets and with painted faces. The Indians of the plains are keen on horse racing, and among the various tribes are to be found some of the fleetest horses in the West, many of them trained to all the tricks of racing.
But you could piece out the drift of it, and there was Mrs. Taylor by your side, eager to help you when you stumbled. Miss Peck wrote that she was overworked in Sidney, Nebraska, and needed a holiday. When the weather grew warm she should like to come to Bear Creek and be like old times. "Like to come and be like old times" filled Mrs. Taylor with sentiment and the cow-punchers with expectation.
They stowed away the luggage with the deft capacity of men who have returned to the primitive art of using their hands. She climbed beside the driver on the box of the stage. Lone Tooth Hank and the cow-punchers chivalrously raised their sombreros with a simultaneous spontaneity that suggested a flight of rockets.
There were men who had won fame as Rocky Mountain stage-drivers, or who had spent endless days in guiding the slow wagon-trains across the grassy plains. There were miners who knew every camp from the Yukon to Leadville, and cow-punchers in whose memories were stored the brands carried by the herds from Chihuahua to Assiniboia.
I feel like an old settler, and I believe the cow-punchers have ceased to regard me as a tenderfoot. That's as flattering as a Ph.D." "I'm afraid they laugh at me," said Marion. "On the contrary. Believe me, these cowboys have taken to reading poetry since you came." "Please be natural, Mr. Smythe!" "Fact!
Evidently he had "begun right away," as the Judge had directed. He had told his fortune to his brother cow-punchers, and this was their answer. "I wonder if Trampas is shouting too?" inquired Ogden. "Hm!" said the Judge. "That is one of the particulars I wash my hands of." I knew that he entirely meant it.
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.
"I wonder what those cow-punchers and miners and gamblers would do with a chap who sauntered in there in evening dress." "He shore would come up ter Stella's conception of a rent rag, which is a torn rag," said Kit. "Ted, won't we go?" pleaded Stella. "Sure, if you want to; you are our guest, and whatever you want, all you have to do is to ask for it," answered Ted.
The poker game was never finished; Thompson's trade was ruined for the day; and the strange group in the roadway became the center of a jostling, uproarious crowd of men and women, who alternately bombarded the three cow-punchers with questions and stared at Sunnysides in silent wonder.
The branding season was at hand, and the next morning Ross Hargis, foreman of the outfit, was mustering his force of some twenty-five men at the ranch, ready to start for the San Carlos range, where the work was to begin. By six o'clock the horses were all saddled, the grub wagon ready, and the cow-punchers were swinging themselves upon their mounts, when Raidler bade them wait.
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