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Her heart seemed to stop as she recognized the big paint-horse at their head. She had not fully realized how much she longed to see Cal Harris. As they swept past she recognized man after man in the light that streamed from the doorways and dimly illuminated the wide street.
"I saw 'em five minutes before you two swung round the point. I was wondering who had outrode the paint-horse and Billie's little nag." Moore's left side was plastered with mud, as was the left side of his mount. "I was on guard and halfway up the far side," he said. "Split Ear took a header with me and delayed me some." He pointed to the mud crusted on his clothes.
The led buckskin moved fretfully and tugged on the lead rope, rousing the man from his abstraction. Distant strings of prairie schooners and ox-bows faded from his mind's eye and he way once more conscious of the red steer with the Three Bar brand that had stirred up the train of reflections. He turned for another glimpse of the distant sign as he headed the paint-horse along the road.
For four hours they headed south and a little east, never slackening their pace except to breathe the horses on some steep ascent. The buckskin and the paint-horse had lost the first snap of their trot and it was evident that they would soon begin to lag. Another hour and they had slowed down perceptibly.
Evans pointed to where Harris, seated on the big pinto, was working slowly through the center of the herd. "He's gone in after another slick," Evans said. "Watch the paint-horse work." Calico was moving after the animal Harris wanted, working easily and without a single sharp rush that would cause undue disturbance among the cows. "A good cow horse is like a hound," Lanky observed.
The boy's face was small and quizzical, a shaggy mop of tawny hair hanging so low upon his forehead that his mild blue eyes peered forth from under the fringe of it and gave him the air of a surprised terrier, which effect had gained him the title of Bangs. "I bet the little paint-horse could make a man swing and rattle to set up in his middle, once he started to act up," he said.
The man took one more look at the evidence left behind to prove that the sign was no empty threat before heading the paint-horse along the left-hand fork. The crisp cool of early spring was blown down from the slope of the hills.
"Let him spot the critter you're wanting and nothing can shake him off." Calico followed a serpentine course through the mass, crowded a three-year-old to the edge and cut him out. The animal attempted to dodge back among his fellows but the paint-horse turned as on a pivot and blocked him, then started him off in a straightaway run. "There's a real rope-horse," Lanky said.
Papoose followed the paint-horse as Harris put Calico down the slippery sidehill and lifted him round the point of the herd. In the same flash Billie had seen two slickers out before the peaks of the run, flapping weirdly in the faces of the foremost cows. This accounted for the slowing-up she had sensed. Two of her men were before them and she wondered how this had come to pass.
Calico pricked his ears sharply toward the Three Bar buildings that stood at the upper end of it. Curious eyes peered from the bunk house as he neared it, for the paint-horse and the buckskin were not without fame even if the man himself were a stranger to them all. For the better part of a year the two high-colored horses had been seen on the range, south to the railroad, west to the Idaho line.
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