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He drew a match sharply along his stamped saddle-skirt and applied it to the cigarette, pinched out the blaze with extreme care, and tossed the match-end facetiously against Concho's nose. He did not seem particularly alarmed at her threat or, perhaps, he did not care.
It was known that the ford was saddle-skirt deep, and some few of the men were strangers to it; but with that passed safely he felt easier, though his blood coursed quicker. It lacked but a few minutes to eleven, and Cave and his detachment of beaters were due to move on the stroke of the hour. They had been given one hundred rounds of six-shooter ammunition to the man and were expected to use it.
Well, Jimmy is a nice name," he said. Then he turned, and still held the boy's hand as he watched the little old negro, who stood with his head under the saddle-skirt, tiptoeing and straining in his effort to unfasten the girth.
Her pink calico dress, newly starched and ironed, had looked so pretty to her when she had started from home, that she had not been able to bear the thought of wearing over it this lovely afternoon her faded, mud-stained riding-skirt; and it was so short that it showed, resting against the saddle-skirt, her little feet loosely fitted into new bronze morocco shoes.
Travis put his revolver back into his overcoat pocket and quieted his mare. The two men, one a negro and the other a mulatto, came up to his saddle-skirt and stood waiting respectfully. "You should have awaited me at The Gaffs, Silos." "We did, sir," said the mulatto, "but the boys are all out here in the woods, and we wanted to hold them together. We didn't know when you would come home."
"I wa'nt sho' it was you," he said, "and I wa'nt sho' you'd kno' me if it was. In my business I have to be mighty keerful," he added with a slight laugh. He came up to the saddle-skirt and held out his hand, half hesitatingly, as he spoke. The Bishop as every one knew him glanced into the face before him and saw something which touched him quickly.
My father, a half-pay dragoon, had me on the pig-skin before my legs were long enough to reach the saddle-skirt; the keeper, in proper time, taught me to shoot: a retired gentleman, olim, of the Welsh fusileers, with a single leg and sixty pounds per annum, paid quarterly by Greenwood and Cox, indoctrinated me in the mystery of tying a fly, and casting the same correctly.
"It's Rick's saddle," said Bud in an agitated tone, after he had made a hasty examination. "I'd know it anywhere from that cut in " His voice trailed off into silence and he gazed with wide-eyed, growing horror at the hand that had rested on the saddle-skirt.
As they turned from the street to cross the arroyo, they saw following at a respectful distance both Curly and Tom Osby, the latter walking at Curly's saddle-skirt, for reasons not visible at a distance. Tom Osby was still continuing his protestations. "You go on over, Curly," said he. "You've done mighty well; now go on and finish up. I ain't in on the messenger part."
I thought I stood a good chance of making seven lucky passes straight I did once, and I never got over it, I guess. I was going to pinch down to ten but I didn't; I let her ride. And SHOT CRAPS!" He drew the match along the stamped saddle-skirt behind the cantle, because that gave him a chance to steal a look behind him without being caught in the act.
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