“I came out to see you on a little business matter, Sandy,” Gard had begun, when one of the cow-punchers demanded the foreman’s attention. Ere he could turn back to Gard, Westcott came down from the casa and mounted his horse which was standing at the rail.
He greeted Gard curtly. “Going to stay and see the fun?” He queried, with a jaunty air of being entirely at home. “I think I will, too. We’ll be glad to have you.”
The future working-stock had been removed to an outlying corral, to make room for the horses the men had been working out. The Palo Verde was short of men that season, and Sandy was obliged to plan his work carefully. The punchers who were to break in the cattle were grouped now, and ready for the fray.
“Come on,” the foreman called to Gard, who had tossed his saddlebags down in front of Sandy’s shack, and the outfit went tearing across the sand to the outer corrals.
A wagon and a plow had been hauled out to the scene of action the night before. The principles of gentling the steers were brief and fundamental. Two punchers threw their ropes over the horns of one big brute and dragged him out upon the desert, while two others brought up his yoke-fellow. Once yoked and hitched, with a riata from the horns of each to the saddle-horn of a good man on a clever pony, to tow them along, the creatures could move forward, or die in their tracks. When, as was usual, they decided to do the former, they were considered gentled. Their future, thereafter, was in the keeping of the Mexican who might have them in hand to plow with.
“Hullo, you heap heathen!” Sandy Larch called out to the Chinese cook in the big wagon as the outfit came thundering up. “How’d you git out here?”
Wing Chang grinned, as was his habit whenever the foreman addressed him.
“Heap tallee fun,” he explained. “Me come look see.”
Sandy Larch and Manuel had already brought out a steer. Broome threw his rope next, cursing roundly at the greenhorn who was helping him, and whose first wild throw covered the horns of the wrong animal. Since it would be quicker work for him to change than for the other, Broome released his “cow,” the big steer that had run him from the corral the week before, and took hold with the greenhorn.
The brutes were yoked and hitched to the wagon, and the fun began with Chang’s precipitate and unpremeditated departure from the vehicle. He rolled over and got to his feet as the cowboys started out over the sand, pell-mell, “pully haul,” in a medley of shrieks and oaths and thunderous bellowings. The spectators of the proceedings kept along upon the flanks of the procession, shouting encouragement or derision to the sweating cowboys as they galloped, and occasionally lending a hand so far as to lean over and apply the spur to one or the other resisting “bos.” In two minutes’ time the wildly gyrating mass was well out on the plain.