CHAPTER XI
THE ROPING MATCH
“Don’t squirm like that, Hildegarde,” remonstrated Miss Van Brunt.
Hilda’s dilated eyes were questing wildly for Uncle Hank among the group of horsemen. He was gone. If she asked Aunt Val she would never be allowed to leave; so without a word she slipped away in search, and presently found him at the corrals. Before him Shorty stood, nursing upon his broad breast, with his left hand, something wrapped in a blood-stained handkerchief.
And that something? Oh, surely it was not Shorty’s own right hand—the hand which could cast the swiftest, cunningest lariat in western Texas—the only one which could write, with a twirl of the looped rope, the children’s formal deed to the dear, dear carriage! Yet it must be so, for Shorty, a grown man, was crying. Down his cheeks the big tears of anger and humiliation and disappointment were following each other, and he groaned:
“Oh, durn a fool—they ain’t worth raisin’! Here I been working my arms and legs off for weeks to get a fine edge on for this roping match—Hank, I ought to have better sense than to let them Romeros get me into a scrimmage—I knew well enough they was out after the carriage for the Matador. Now I’ve busted my hand on Juan Romero’s jaw. None of our boys is readied up to ride for the Sorrows. There’s nobody to get that carriage for the kids. Hank—you ought to fire me.”
Uncle Hank’s back was to Hilda. Unseen, unsuspected she stood there, a small but excellent statue of Dismay. Here, at one blow, all hope and delight were struck out of life. Quite blind with despair, she turned and made a stumbling and uncertain way back to the grand stand, squeezing into her place beside Aunt Val and Burchie, carefully drawing her little dusty feet as far as possible from that lady’s flounced skirts.
Darkness had fallen upon her world. Did these people about her think that the sun shone and that they were having a fair? Within Hilda’s mind final disaster had arrived. Listlessly she sat beside her aunt, watching heavy-eyed while the preparations for the favorite event were made. She saw the wild outlaw steers, that had been gathered from all the ranches about, driven in, fighting, bellowing, protesting, as they poured into the oval in-field of the race-track, where they were held in a large pen from which a smaller one opened by heavy bars. This should have been a glorious sight, but now it was only part of the pageant of Hilda’s defeat.
Even when Colonel Jack Peyton, formerly of Kentucky, rode out upon his gold-dust sorrel with the cream-colored mane, and, lifting high his hat with a double-curved sweep, announced that the roping match was about to begin, she just let him be Colonel Peyton. If Shorty couldn’t ride, it was no use summoning The-Boy-On-The-Train to be judge. The crowd cheered him, as it always cheered the pictorial Kentuckian. Peyton bowed, flashed his white teeth in a smile beneath his dark mustache and recited the terms:
Each man should have only one trial, thus making the struggle short and sharp, and tincturing it with the stimulating element, chance. For the battle was lost to him who failed to get a quick start after the steer at the outset, who missed his cast too often, or whose horse stumbled in a prairie-dog hole. From the mouth of the smaller pen, a steer was to be loosed to each contestant, and the moment his steer crossed the chalk-line he should be free to follow.
The contestants rode out and arranged themselves in front of the judge’s stand. Hilda loved the sight of mounted men, accoutered as she was used to see them, for action. But she gave these a leaden glance—Shorty was not there. Young Doctor Ellis was near the center; he had a ranch of his own—maybe he’d win, and his little girls would ride in that carriage and never know that it belonged to Hilda and Burch—that it belonged to them “thrice over.” Dark and hateful looked the faces of the Romero brothers; Hilda would have had no trouble in placing them in her ballad world just then. They were “the enemy.”