United States or Mongolia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Bill, by all these signs and tokens, was limbering up his keen old range-bred wits for action. "Well, I'll tell yuh. The way to get at the thing is to figger out why you'd do it, s'posin' you was in their place.
But Slade is almost through. His claws are clipped." The girl started to question him as to Carp's activities but after the first sentence she became aware that his attention was riveted on something other than her words. He had thrown up his head like a startled buck and was peering down the valley. Her range-bred ears caught and correctly interpreted the sound which had roused him.
He was range-bred as purely Western as were the cattle he tended but he was not altogether ignorant of the ways of the world, past or present.
He pitied the poor cattle still fighting famine and frost as only range-bred stock can fight. He pictured them drifting miserably before the fury of the wind or crowding for shelter under some friendly cutback, their tails to the storm, waiting stolidly for the dawn that would bring no relief. Then, with the roar and rattle in his ears, he fell asleep.
All the way out from Texas he had practiced doggedly with the lariat, and his best fell far short of what a range-bred child could do. Yet he had an audience waiting down at the corral. Drew’s mouth was a straight line. He would soon confirm their belief that Don Cazar had in truth hired Shiloh instead of his owner.
Billy Louise guessed shrewdly that he was down in the meadows, looking over the cattle and trying to estimate the extent of the thievery. She put Blue in the stable and fed him, with that half-mechanical habit of attending to the needs of one's mount which becomes second nature to the range-bred. She would not go on to the Wolverine; that needed no decision; she accepted it at once as a fact.
At nineteen years of age Lorraine Hunter, daughter of old Brit Hunter of the TJ up-and-down, became a real "range-bred girl" with a real Stetson hat of her own, a green corduroy riding skirt, gray flannel shirt, brilliant neckerchief, boots and spurs. A third picture gave her further practice in riding a real horse, albeit an extremely docile animal called Mouse with good reason.
The rig was near the house now, and as she got up her dress moved the newspaper, which was caught by a draught and blew down the stairs and across the grass. It flapped in the fresh wind and fell near the horses' feet. This was too much for the range-bred animals to stand, and they reared and plunged, and then began to back away from the fluttering white object.
If you never slept on the new grass with only a bit of canvas between you and the stars; if you have never rolled out, at daylight, and dressed before your eyes were fair open, and rushed with the bunch over to the mess-wagon for your breakfast; if you have never saddled hurriedly a range-bred and range-broken cayuse with a hump in his back and seven devils in his eye, and gone careening across the dew-wet prairie like a tug-boat in a choppy sea; if you have never well, if you don't know what it's all like, and how it gets into the very bones of you so that the hankering never quite leaves you when you try to give it up, I'm not going to tell you.
And toward the man who is citified your purely range-bred product cherishes a distinct if secret grudge. His immaculate presence made them all feel frowsy and unwashed and ill-clad. And to hide how conscious he was of his own deficiencies, the man who sat nearest Lance lifted his hat and rumpled his hair still more. "Duke and Al didn't get in yet, eh?"
Word Of The Day