“What!” exclaimed Mr. Masterson aloud, and he pulled up his horse to listen. “It’s a good ways off as yet,” he continued. “It must be a hummer to send its word so far.” Then, patting his horse’s neck: “My sympathies will be all with you, old boy, when it reaches us.”
Over in the northwest a cloud came suddenly up with the swiftness of a drawn curtain. One by one it shut out like a screen the stars and the moon. Mr. Masterson was on the ground in the puff of an instant.
“It’ll detain him as much as it does me,” thought Mr. Masterson, whose mind ran always on his quarry.
Mr. Masterson took a pair of hopples from the saddle and fastened the fore fetlocks of his horse. Then he stripped off the saddle.
“I’ll leave you the blanket,” remarked Mr. Masterson, “but I’m going to need the saddle for myself.”
Mr. Masterson crouched upon the ground, making the saddle a roof to cover his head, the skirts held tight about his shoulders by the girths. The roar grew until from a million drums it improved to be a million flails on as many threshing-floors. Mr. Masterson clawed the saddleskirts tight as with a swish and a swirl the hailstorm was upon him. The round hailstones beat upon the saddle like buckshot. They leaped and bounded along the ground. They showed of a size and hardness to compare with those toys meant for children’s games.
Saved by the saddle, Mr. Masterson came through without a mark. His horse, with nothing more defensive than a square of saddle-blanket, had no such luck. Above the drumming of the hailstones Mr. Masterson might hear that unfortunate animal as, torn by mixed emotions of pain, amazement and indignation, it bucked about the scene in a manner that would have done infinite grace to a circus. A best feature of the hailstorm was that it did not last five minutes; it passed to the south and east, and its mutterings grew fainter and more faint with every moment.
The storm over, Mr. Masterson caught up his horse, which seemed much subdued of spirit by what it had gone through. As gently as might be—to humour the bruises—he recinched the heavy saddle in its place.
“Better keep you moving now, old boy,” quoth Mr. Masterson, “it’ll take the soreness out. You needn’t shout about it,” he concluded, as the sorely battered horse gave a squeal of pain; “a hailstone isn’t a bullet, and it might have been worse, you know.”
Again Mr. Masterson stretched southward, and again the moon and stars came out to light the way. The storm had drawn forth the acrid earth-smells that sleep in the grass-roots on the plains. To mix with these, it brought a breath from the pine-sown Rockies four hundred miles away. These are the odours which soak into a man and make him forever of the West.