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Swinging her rope above her head, she chased it back until it was about in the middle of the field, and suddenly the rope left her hand unerringly and shot through the air, seemed to hesitate for an instant, then fell over the steer's head. Custer came to a stop the moment the rope left her hand, with his body well braced.
She was after that bald-faced steer, and in a moment she had him. The whirling noose dropped and in some wonderful way settled over a horn and one of the steer's forefeet. When Molly stopped and braced herself, the steer pitched forward, turned a complete somersault, and lay on the prairie at the mercy of his captor. "Hurray!" yelled Pratt, swinging his hat. He was riding recklessly himself.
The rope stretched tighter; the girl saw Patches putting a steady pull on it. The loop had fallen around the steer's neck; she heard the animal cough for breath once, then its breath was cut off. In this minute the girl's chief emotion was one of admiration for the pony. How accurate its movements in this crisis! How unerring its judgment!
Such colour is to the colourist what the drug is to the opium-eater: nothing matters, the world is behind us, and we dream on and on, lost in an infinity of suggestion. This quality, which, for want of a better expression, I call the optimism of painting, is a peculiar characteristic of Mr. Steer's work.
The man had killed it that morning, and it was being cooked for a starving child. In another lodge, the hoof of a steer was cooking, only the hoof, to make soup for the family. Twenty-three lodges Major Allen visited that day, and the little rabbit and the steer's hoof were all the food he found. "And then," he told me, with tears in his eyes, "I broke down. I could go no further.
He found that the gambling apparatus had been taken away, except the heavy crap table, which was made over into a pulpit, and that chairs and benches had been arranged into seats for a congregation. A store-boat man climbed to the boat's roof at 10:30, with a Texas steer's horn nearly three feet long, and began to blow.
"Some fool steer's got through the fence and gone stumbling through the brush piles," he muttered to himself. The explanation had the merit of explaining; and when the sound had ceased the boy once more set the bark trumpet to his lips and sounded its harsh appeal. This time he called twice.
You've got a lot o' sense, Jinny, an' if you think he's tellin' the truth, why, it goes; but it's as big a mixup as a lariat in a steer's horns. You've got to hide him sure, whoever he is, for I wouldn't hand an Eskimo over, if I'd taken him in my home once; we're mountain people. A man ought to be hung for horse-stealin', but this was different.
He had caused my discomfiture by jumping on the steer's back, the box having broken open coming over the stones. When I returned from putting the bullocks on the grass, I saw my mate laughing, and to my inquiry he replied: "When you left with the bullocks I inquired from the boy what the trouble was?"
There was a black two-year-old steer among the lead cattle, and every time I looked at him, I saw old Redman, with his humped shoulder, his pug nose, and his half-shut eyes. It took the storm, the sullen drift, to put that expression in the black steer's face, but it was old Redman.
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