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"I am not much accustomed to equestrian exercise, but I'll try," answered Mr Tidey; "and unless you have five-bar gates to leap, and the boundless prairie to gallop over, I trust that I shall stick on the back of the animal. I don't like to be defeated, and I should not like to abandon the undertaking on account of my want of equestrian skill.
You don't expect us to knock round in those, do you?" "Sure not. But if you wore those caps you'd get sunstruck out on the plains. We've got some sombreros you can take." As the boys trooped out onto the piazza Tom espied a five-bar fence about a hundred yards from the house. "That's the horse corral," explained Horace, noting the direction of his friend's gaze.
Well, I run on to an unbranded Pot-Hook-S calf that looks good to me, but I don't dare put my iron on him because he's too young to leave his mother. If I let him go until he is older, some of Jim Reid's riders will brand him, and, you see, I never could work over the Pot-Hook-S iron into my Five-Bar. So I earmark the calf with the owner's marks, and don't brand him at all. Then he's a sleeper.
The Five-Bar is my iron, you know I have a few head running with Uncle Will's." Even as he spoke, the calf, frightened at their closer approach, ran to a cow that was branded as Phil had said, and the cow, with unmistakable maternal interest in her offspring, proved the ownership of the calf. "You see?" said Phil.
"Are you sure?" "Yes, sir. I watched them for half an hour." "What was in the bunch?" "Four steers, a Pot-Hook-S bull, five cows and this calf. There were three Five-Bar cows, one Diamond-and-a-Half and one Cross-Triangle. The calf went to the Cross-Triangle cow every time. And, besides, he is marked just like his mother. I saw her again this afternoon while we were working the cattle."
Can't you understand this: it would never occur to me that I could vault over a five-bar gate if I had been born a cripple? but the conscious possession of a little pliant muscularity might well tempt me to try it. 'And get a cropper for your pains. 'Be it so.
"If I was you, I'd put some hand that I knew to ridin' that drift fence," returned Jim significantly, as he mounted his horse to go. "You're plumb wrong, Jim," returned the Dean earnestly. "Why, the man don't know a Cross-Triangle from a Five-Bar, or a Pot-Hook-S." "It's your business, Will; I just thought I'd tell you," growled Reid. "Good-night!" "Good-night, Jim!
"I know because I know the stock," Phil explained, "and because I happen to remember that particular calf, in the rodeo last spring. He got away from us, with his mother, in the cedars and brush over near the head of Mint Wash. That's one of the things that you have to learn in this business, you see. But, to be sure we're right, you watch him a minute, and you'll see him go to a Five-Bar cow.
The end of the race was a leap into the air that would have cleared a five-bar fence, and down pitched the fighting horse on braced legs again.
Twenty-six horses crossed it, one of them ridden by a lady. A mile or so farther on, before there had been a chance for much tailing, we came to a five-bar gate, out of a road a jump of just four feet five inches from the take-off.
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