The Night Riders: A Romance of Early Montana. Cullum Ridgwell

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СКАЧАТЬ blood fairly up, was on top of her almost before the man holding her realized his intention. The mare was foaming at the mouth, and a lather of sweat dripped from her tuckered flanks. The whites of her eyes were flaming scarlet now, and when she was let loose again she tried to savage her rider’s legs. Failing this, she threw her head up violently, and, all unprepared for it, Tresler received the blow square in the mouth. Then she was up on her hind legs, fighting the air with her front feet, and a moment later crashed over backward. And again it seemed like a miracle that he escaped; he slid out of the saddle, not of his own intention, and rolled clear as she came down.

      This time she was caught before she could struggle to her feet, and when at last she stood up she was dazed and shaken, though still unconquered.

      Again Tresler mounted. He was bruised and bleeding, and shaking as with an ague. And now the mare tried a new move. She bucked; but it was a running buck, her body twisting and writhing with curious serpentine undulations, and her body seemed to shrink under his legs as though the brute were drawing in her whole frame of a settled purpose. Then, having done enough in this direction, she suddenly stood, and began to kick violently, with her head stretched low between her forelegs. And Tresler felt himself sliding, saddle and all, over her withers! Suddenly the blanket strap failed him. It cracked and gave, and he shot from the saddle like a new-fired rocket.

      And when the mare had been caught again she was without the saddle, which was now lying close to where her rider had fallen. She had bucked and kicked herself clean through the still-fastened cinchas.

      Tresler was bleeding from nose and ears when he mounted again. The saddle was cinched up very tight, and the mare herself was so blown that she was unable to distend herself to resist the pressure. But, nevertheless, she fought as though a devil possessed her, and, exhausted, and without the help of the blanket strap, he was thrown again and again. Five times he fell; and each time, as no bones were broken, he remounted her. But he was growing helpless.

      But the men looking on realized that which was lost upon the rider himself. The mare was done; she was fairly beaten. The fifth time he climbed into the saddle her bucks wouldn’t have thrown a babe; and when they beheld this, they, with one accord, shouted to him.

      “Say, thrash her, boy! Lace h – out of her!” roared Jacob.

      “Cut her liver out wi’ that quirt!” cried Lew.

      “Ay, run her till she can’t see,” added Raw.

      And Tresler obeyed mechanically. He was too exhausted to do much; but he managed to bring the quirt down over her shoulders, until, maddened with pain, she rose up on her hind legs, gave a mighty bound forward, and raced away down the trail like a creature possessed.

      It was dinner-time when Tresler saw the ranch again. He returned with the mare jaded and docile. He had recovered from the battle, while she had scarcely energy enough to put one foot before the other. She was conquered. To use Arizona’s expression, when, from the doorway of the bunkhouse, he saw the mare crawling up the trail toward the ranch —

      “Guess she’s loaded down till her springs is nigh busted.”

      And Tresler laughed outright in Jake’s face when that individual came into the barn, while he was rubbing her down, and generally returning good for evil, and found fault with his work.

      “Where, I’d like to know, have you been all this time?” he asked angrily. Then, as his eyes took in the pitiful sight of the exhausted mare, “Say, you’ve ruined that mare, and you’ll have to make it good. We don’t keep horses for the hands to founder. D’you see what you’ve done? You’ve broke her heart.”

      “And if I’d had the chance I’d have broken her neck too,” Tresler retorted, with so much heat, that, in self-defense, the foreman was forced to leave him alone.

      That afternoon the real business of ranching began. Lew Cawley was sent out with Tresler to instruct him in mending barbed-wire fences. A distant pasture had been broken into by the roving cattle outside. Lew remained with him long enough to show him how to strain the wires up and splice them, then he rode off to other work.

      Tresler was glad to find himself out on the prairie away from the unbearable influence of the ranch foreman. The afternoon was hot, but it was bright with the sunshine, which, in the shadow of the mountains, is so bracing. The pastures he was working in were different from the lank weedy-grown prairie, although of the same origin. They were irrigated, and had been sown and re-sown with timothy grass and clover. The grass rose high up to the horse’s knees as he rode, and the quiet, hard-working animal, his own property, reveled in the sweet-scented fodder which he could nip at as he moved leisurely along.

      And Tresler worked very easily that afternoon. Not out of indolence, not out of any ill-feeling toward his foreman. He was weary after his morning’s exertions, and, besides, the joy of being out in the pure, bright air, on that wondrous sea of rolling green grass with its illimitable suggestion of freedom and its gracious odors, seduced him to an indolence quite foreign to him. He was beyond the view of the ranch, with two miles of prairie rollers intervening, so he did his work without concern for time.

      It was well after four o’clock when the last strand of wire was strung tight. Then, for want of a shady tree to lean his back against, he sat down by a fence post and smoked, while his horse, with girths loosened, and bit removed from its mouth, grazed joyfully near by.

      And then he slept. The peace of the prairie world got hold of him; the profound silence lulled his fagged nerves, his pipe went out, and he slept.

      He awoke with a start. Nor, for the moment, did he know where he was. His pipe had fallen from his mouth, and he found himself stretched full length upon the ground. But something unusual had awakened him, and when he had gathered his scattered senses he looked about him to ascertain what the nature of the disturbance had been. The next moment a laughing voice hailed him.

      “Is this the way you learn ranching, Mr. Tresler? Oh, shame! Sleeping the glorious hours of sunshine away.”

      It was the rich, gentle voice of Diane Marbolt, and its tone was one of quiet raillery. She was gazing down at him from the back of her sturdy broncho mare, Bessie, with eyes from which, for the moment at least, all sadness had vanished.

      Just now her lips were wreathed in a bright smile, and her soft brown eyes were dancing with a joyous light, which, when Tresler had first seen her, had seemed impossible to them. She was out on the prairie, on the back of her favorite, Bessie; she was away from the ranch, from the home that possessed so many cares for her. She was out in her world, the world she loved, the world that was the only world for her, breathing the pure, delicious air which, even in moments of profound unhappiness, had still power to carry her back to the days of happy, careless childhood; had still power to banish all but pleasant thoughts, and to bestow upon her that wild sense of freedom such as is only given to those who have made their home on its virgin bosom.

      Tresler beheld this girl now in her native mood. He saw before him the true child of the prairie such as she really was. She was clad in a blue dungaree habit and straw sun-hat, and he marveled at the ravishing picture she made. He raised himself upon his elbow and stared at her, and a sensation of delight swept over him as he devoured each detail of face and figure. Then, suddenly, he was recalled to his senses by the abrupt fading of the smile from the face before him; and he flushed with a rueful sense of guiltiness.

      “Fairly caught napping, Miss Marbolt,” he said, in confusion. “I acknowledge the sloth, but not the implied laxness anent ranching. Believe me, I have learned an ample lesson to-day. I now have a fuller appreciation of our worthy foreman; a fair knowledge of the horse, most accurately termed ‘outlaw’, as the bruised condition of my body can testify; and, as for barbed-wire fencing, I really СКАЧАТЬ