"Hah!" laughed the twister, stepping dexterously aside; and, swinging the bridle as he ducked, he brought the heavy reins down across his mount's rump. Again there was a flash of light as the Snake lashed out from behind; and then he limped off to one side, his eyes glowing with impotent rage and hate. Bowles looked at him as he lay wearily down in the sand, and then at the man who had conquered him, and a glow crept into his own eyes—a glow very much like the Big Snake's. He had entered a new world, with a different standard of courage and hardihood, and the first look at it frightened and awed him. But though he knew he could not meet its standards nor measure up to its tests, he scorned the man who could, and hated him for his rude strength—and his sympathy went out to Big Snake, the outlaw.
CHAPTER IX
REDUCED TO THE RANKS
The last place in the world for a humanitarian is around a cow camp, for everything there seems to savor of cruelty and blood. The only anti-cruelty-to-animals man who ever made a winning in the cattle business was good old Dr. Maverick, of Texas, who, when they made up the first brand book, swore he could not bring himself to cut an ear or burn a brand and craved the privilege of letting his cattle run unmarked. So, when it came to the round-up, the old doctor received his reward, for he claimed every maverick in the bunch and took them home for his own. This was a long time ago, in the age of myth and fable, and the doctor's herd has been sadly decimated since by rustlers and ruthless brand blotchers. A brand that can't be burned over is more precious than rubies now; and the bigger it is, the better.
The Bat Wing was an old brand, dating back to some Mexican Manuel Ortega, or Mariano Ortiz, who had writ his initials large on the left hip of his steers, M above O, connected. With years the O had shrunk and the M spraddled out until it looked like a winged disk—and had taken on different names: Money-bug, from its resemblance to a dollar on the wing; Bat-out-o'-hell, from a similar frontier fancy; until finally it settled down to plain Bat Wing. But whatever else happened to the Bat Wing brand, the iron never got any smaller; in fact, the reason the M grew so big that it flew away with the O was because a calf's hip widens out at the top and if the whole space is securely covered there will be no room left for illicit alterations.
This is all very interesting and romantic, of course, when taken by itself; but nobody stopped to explain it to Bowles, the humanitarian cowboy. When the cattle were on the cutting-grounds and the branding was about to begin, Henry Lee cast a contemptuous glance at his new hand and decided to put him to work.
"Bowles," he said, "you help with the flanking."
So when the first little calf came gamboling in on the line, Bowles rushed out and seized the rope. Working down to the calf, he caught it by its neck and flank and finally wrestled it to the ground. He was casting loose the rope when Buck Buchanan grabbed the calf by the upper hind leg, braced his boot against the lower leg, and sat comfortably down behind. Then Happy Jack came ramping out with a red-hot stamp-iron and slapped it against the tender hide.
"Baaa!" blatted the little calf, rolling its eyes until they showed the whites. "Baaa!" And then, before it knew what was happening, Hardy Atkins knelt roughly on its neck, grabbed its left ear, and cut away half of it at a single stroke of the knife. "Baaa!" bellowed the calf, curling up its tail; and as the blood trickled forth Bowles felt himself grow sick and faint.