“Now, ain’t that too bad!” said one of the more sober musicians, who now strolled over from the Drovers’ Cottage.
“Here, you!” commanded Cinquo. “You go back to that cart where the nigger woman is at and get her to give you the hide of that yearlin’ we killed yesterday.
“Gentlemen,” continued Cinquo, drawing himself up to his full height, after he had the victim properly strung out, “this may be a cow town, but you-all don’t know nothing about cows. Now look at that! Just because it’s Fourth of July, you think you got any right to bust the best damn steer that ever come out of Texas?”
Alamo and Cinquo were to take the first curtain call. The boy was no theorist. Under his direction they brought him some pieces of barrel staves. Around these he wound again and again strips of the green hide, stretching it tight—perhaps the first surgery on a Texas steer, if not the last, ever known on the long trail up from the Southern lands.
“Rawhide,” explained Cinquo to the gathering group, “is the holdin’est thing there is. Once that dries, that steer’s laig will be a lot better’n new—if it don’t dry too tight. Is them the pens over yon?” he continued. “Well, swing a pole acrost the sides of the chute. Some of you-all go and git some grass or hay. We’ll make a belly-band o’ the rest of the hide and swing him up offen the ground so it won’t hurt his sore laig.
“This here steer’s name is Alamo,” he explained to his audience. “He’s the onliest Texas cow or horse I ever knowed to have a name. But he started through. What us Texans starts we finishes. Git back now and leave me if he can stand up.”
Old Alamo, relieved of rope and with no weight on his neck, proved his mettle by springing to his feet as though nothing had happened, and only the strange feeling in his foreleg prevented his charging the crowd as an evidence of good faith. But Cinquo impressed Sanchez, who was visible coming up, and Alamo yielded to the force of numbers and of skill. A man flung open the gate of the Abilene Stockyards. Alamo entered in.
“He’s one game steer,” said McCoyne, when later he found him there in place, in solitary grandeur. “If five hundred dollars will buy that steer he’s mine right now, and I’ll keep him as long as he lives. Hurrah for old Alamo, the first steer up the trail! Strike up some more music again, fellows; he can’t get away now. Show my friends from Texas what a Fourth of July can be in Abilene.”
But a certain thought came to the mind of Mr. McCoyne upon the instant.
“We’ve forgot about that young lady in the cart,” said he. “Anyhow, she ain’t stampeded. I told you we had a woman along, and now I’ll prove it. Come on, men, march in front and play your damnedest. I’m going to fetch her up to the Cottage.”