CHAPTER IV
PICKING A LIVELY BRONCHO
On seeing the ranch, Bob-Cat and Wilbur had put their ponies to a burst of speed and in a few minutes they reached the corral. The buildings, while comfortable enough, were far from pretentious, and even their strangeness scarcely made up to the boy for the lack of the picturesque. Then, of course, the fact that the cattle at that time of year were scattered all over the range and consequently that none of them were in sight, rendered it still less like his ideal of a cattle ranch, where he had half expected to see thousands of long-horned cattle tossing their heads the while that cowboys galloped around them shouting and firing off pistols.
In contrast with this, the dwelling, the bunk-house, the cooking shack, and the other frame sheds, all of the neutral gray that unpainted wood becomes when exposed to the weather, seemed very unexciting indeed. But when the lad turned to the corral, he felt that there was compensation there. Several hundred horses were in the enclosure, of many colors and breeds, but the greater part of them Indian ponies, or containing a strain of the mustang, and smaller and shaggier than the horses he had been accustomed to ride in his Illinois home.
The boy turned to his companion, his eyes shining with excitement.
"Do you suppose that I can buy any of those horses that I want to?" he said.
"If you're totin' along a pile of dinero, you might," was the reply, "but there's a few cayuses in there that would surely redooce a big roll o' bills to pretty skinny pickin's. For example, this little bay I'm ridin' now ain't any special wonder, an' maybe he's only worth about fifty dollars, but you can't buy him for five hundred. I reckon, though, you c'n trot away with most of 'em in there for ninety or a hundred dollars apiece."
"I hadn't expected to pay more than seventy or seventy-five," said Wilbur, his native shrewdness coming to the front, "and I think I ought to be able to pick up a good horse or two for that, don't you think?"
"There's allers somethin' that ain't worth much to be got cheap," said the cowboy, "but I don't look friendly none on payin' a cheap price for a horse. Speakin' generally, there's somethin' that every feller likes a whole lot, an' out here, where domestic life ain't our chief play, it's mostly a horse. Leastways, when I hit the long trail, I'll be just as sorry to leave some ponies behind as I will humans."