“Yes, yes, I am a tenderfoot, as you call it,” admitted Antoine, “that is, I have never been in this part of the country before.”
“Then how, in the name of a pea-green, six-toothed rattle-snake, did you get the inside rail on this little bronc’ o’ mine?”
“That is quite easy,” the young paleontologist answered. “One of the things that I know is the bones of a horse. You can tell a plow horse from a cow-pony?”
“They don’t make any liquor with kick enough in it to make me that blind,” was the reply.
“Yet the only difference is that the bones of one are heavier than those of the other,” Antoine remarked. “My eye is more trained to small differences than yours, that is all. You know horses?”
“In straight cow-country fashion, I ain’t no slouch,” the range-rider declared. “I c’n pick the best pony out of a jammed corral quicker’n a scared jack-rabbit c’n make three jumps.”
“How do you tell?”
The other thought for a moment.
“I jest takes a look at ’em an’ knows right off,” he answered. “A real cow-pony shapes up right.”
“But the shape is merely muscle and skin over the bones,” the other reminded him. “Suppose the skeletons of half a dozen horses were all mixed up in a heap, you couldn’t put them together?”