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On the ranch-house veranda sat Walter Stone conversing with his host, where several girls, bright-faced and gowned in cool white, were talking and laughing. The pony headed straight for the veranda. The laughing group jumped to their feet. Collie, using both hands, swung the hackamore across the outlaw's neck and tugged. She stopped with a jolt that all but unseated him. Walter Stone rose.
He drew it back as far as he could. She stepped around, closer, and more back of him, and put a hand on him, gently, for an instant. Then she slipped out of the brush and, untying one lasso from the pommel, she returned to the horse and pulled it from round his legs. He was free now, except the hackamore, and that rope was slack.
"Come now, Buckskin," said Roy, soothingly, and he slowly approached the quivering animal. He went closer, hand over hand, on the lasso. Buckskin showed the whites of his eyes and also his white teeth. But he stood while Roy loosened the loop and, slipping it down over his head, fastened it in a complicated knot round his nose. "Thet's a hackamore," he said, indicating the knot.
Wildfire reared a little and shook a little, but this disappeared presently under her touch. He held his head very high and watched her with wonderful eyes. Gradually she drew his head down. Standing before him, she carefully and slowly changed the set of the hackamore, which had made a welt on his nose.
"Good thing those hombres are afoot. We'll get on a little farther and then we'll fix a hackamore so you can do your own riding," "I can't stand it to ride any farther " "Are you shot?" Dade pulled in a little and looked anxiously into his face. "It's the rope. They tied it so tight it's torture.
Gently she worked the hackamore over his nose and above his ears, and when it was safely in place she breathed a deep sigh of relief and throwing her arms about his neck pressed her cheek to his. "You dear old Brazos," she whispered. The horse stood quietly while the girl wriggled herself to his back, and then at a word and a touch from her heels moved off at a walk in the direction of the ford.
She passed over to the bars that closed the opening from the corral into the pasture and wormed her way between two of them. A hackamore with a piece of halter rope attached to it hung across the upper bar. Taking it down she moved off across the pasture in the direction the saddle horses most often took when liberated from the corral.
Miguel of the Moonstone removed his sombrero and gravely passed it. "Flowers for the Collie kid," he said solemnly. Collie, grave, alert, a little white beneath his tan, called for Williams to hold the pony. Then the younger man, talking to her meanwhile, slipped off the bridle and adjusted a hackamore in its place. He tightened the cinchas. The men had ceased joking.
If the Dean had not so abruptly turned his back upon the landscape, he would have noticed the figure of a man moving slowly along the road that skirted the valley meadow leading from Simmons to the Cross-Triangle Ranch. Presently the riders returned, and Phil, when he had removed saddle, blanket and hackamore from his pupil, seated himself on the edge of the watering trough beside the Dean.
He wore no spurs; and as for Surry, he had no bridle and bit, but a hackamore instead. Jack threw the reins over the neck of the horse. "Come, old fellow," he said, quite as if he were speaking to a person, and started off.
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