"Do as you please," retorted Van Horn, but with a stiff expletive that irritated Barb still further. Then swinging on his heel, Van Horn marched off. Barb was so incensed he could only keep his raised finger pointed after Van Horn; and as his eyes blazed he shouted through a very fog of throat-scraping: "I will."
CHAPTER XIII
AGAINST HIS RECORD
On the level stretch between the ranch-house and the creek the cowboys staged, after dinner, a Frontier Day show and a Fourth of July celebration combined. The fun began mildly with the three-legged races and the business of the greased pig. From these diversions it proceeded to foot races, in which Indians shone, and to keenly contested pony races between cowboys, Reservation bucks and sports from Sleepy Cat. Money was stacked with freedom and differences of opinion were intensified by victory and defeat.
While the spirit ran high, rodeo riding began with the master artists of the range and the pink of American horsemanship in the saddle. In each succeeding contest the Sleepy Cat visitors headed by Sawdy and Lefever with big loose bunches of currency backed their favorites freely, and men that counted nothing of caution in their make-up took the other end of every exciting event. Flushed faces and loud voices added to the rapidly shifting excitement as one event followed another, and the betting fever keenly roused called, after every possible wager had been laid, for fresh material to work on.
It was at this juncture that the shooting matches began. In a line and in a country in which many excelled in perhaps the most important regard, rivalry ran high and critics were naturally fastidious. The temptation to belittle even excellent work with rifle and revolver was, in Sawdy and especially in Carpy, partly due to temperament. Both men were bad gamesters because they bet on feeling rather than judgment. They would back a man, or the horse of a man they liked, against a man they did not like and sometimes thereby knew what it was to close the day with empty pockets.
On this Fourth of July at Doubleday's, both men, as well as Lefever, had been hit by hard luck. Their free criticism of the horse-racing and the shooting did not pass unresented and the fact that Tom Stone and his following had most of the Sleepy Cat money while the sun was still high did not tend to temper the acerbity of their remarks.
Nothing that the crack shots of the range could do would satisfy either Sawdy or Carpy. Van Horn, himself an expert with rifle and gun, was master of these ceremonies and the belittling by the Sleepy Cat sports of the best the cowboys could show, nettled him: "Before you knock this any more," he said, "put up some better shooting."
The taunt went far enough home to stir the fault-finders. Sawdy and Carpy took grumpy counsel together. Presently they hunted up Laramie, who in front of the ranch-house was talking horses with Kitchen and Doubleday. They told him the situation and asked for help: "Come over to the creek and show the bunch up, Jim," was Sawdy's appeal.