Came a sudden blare of brass—a cataclysmic thing in its results, generously intended and not lacking precedent in welcomes, but failing in all understanding of a herd of Texas cattle.
Probably each musician was playing the air which pleased him best. It made no difference. With one tremendous rush and roar the herd surged, broke, ran. The wildly rolling tails betokened one of the sharpest stampedes of the entire trail. Simultaneously the great majority of the saddle ponies began efforts to disencumber themselves of their riders, in whom they now apparently had lost all confidence. Had the population of Abilene sought a circus, they needed now no more than to look about them.
The band played on, as those having engaged in an undertaking which they did not like to discontinue. But they played on to an empty house. The Del Sol herd was gone!
The riders leaned once more into the work, headed by Nabours, profoundly cursing all brass bands, in a run the worst they had seen, even in their abundant experience. The men of Abilene had the first and finest opportunity of their lives to see a herd of wild Texas cattle handled as no men other than these could have done the work. Even for these it took time and distance.
The sudden burst of melody had left the cattle without concertedness. They broke into different bands, even deserting their vanguard. Of the latter, old Alamo, the giant steer that had paced the herd for a thousand miles, alone held to the proper course. Alamo laid back his horns and raised his muzzle like some wild elk. He dashed past the mob, past the band at the Drovers’ Cottage, past everything of Abilene except the railroad and the stockyards.
“Pore old Alamo!” said Jim Nabours later. “He shore knowed which way was north, but he didn’t seem to know nothing else.”
The head of old Alamo with its immense sweep of horns in later years long was known in the general freight office of a Western railroad, where, had he then retained his faculties, he might at every hour of the day and night have noted sight and sound of railway activities. But at the time then current, Alamo had never seen a bit of railroad iron in all his life. Perhaps to his startled gaze the two twisting lines of steel were two giant snakes. In any event, Alamo swerved suddenly, trying to evade them. His hard hoofs slipped on the metals and he fell. His right foreleg, doubled under him, snapped below the knee under his own weight and that of two other steers which had made bold to follow him. So there he lay, much like other figures in completed destiny.
Engaged in opposite directions, not many of the men of Abilene or of Del Sol noted what happened. There came out of the dust, spurring forward, only one slim ragged rider—who even had left his beloved horses—the boy Cinquo Centavos who, so it seemed, had some sort of admiration and understanding of the lead steer of Del Sol.
Excited, tears streaming down his dusty face as always in his moments of tension, Cinquo spurred up to the railroad track and sprang down where the great steer lay struggling. His was the first rope that ever sang in Abilene streets. It caught the great steer over the horns and laid him flat, the pony setting back even as his rider left the saddle.
“Oh, Alamo!” wept Cinquo, seating himself on the steer’s muzzle to quiet his plunging. “You done busted that laig plumb off!”