"That is where you are wrong," a cow-boy called Broncho Harry said. "Trust to a jack to find out the best forage and the nearest water. He would manage to pick up a living where a horse would starve. He doesn't get scared and lose his head about nothing as a horse does. If there is a noise, he just cocks one ear forward and makes up his mind what it is about, and then goes on eating, while a horse fidgets and sweats, and is ready to bolt from his own shadow; besides, the horses know that the jack is their master."
"Why, you don't mean to say that a donkey can kick harder than a horse?"
"I don't say he can kick harder, though a mule can, and twice as quick; but a jack does not fight that way, he fights with his teeth. I have seen several fights between stallions and jacks, and the jack has always got the best of it. I remember down at the Red Springs there was a big black stallion with a bunch of mares came down the valley where we camped, and he went at the horses and stampeded them all down the valley. Well, we had a jack with us; he did not seem to pay much attention to what was going on until the stallion came rushing at him, thinking no doubt that he was going to knock his brains straight out with a blow of his fore-foot, but the jack went at him with open mouth, dodged a blow of his hoofs, and made a spring and caught him by the neck. He held on like a bull-dog. The stallion reared and plunged, and lifted the jack off his feet time after time, but each time he came down with his legs stiff and well apart.
"The stallion struck at him with his fore-legs, and cut the skin off his shoulders. Once or twice they fell, but the jack never let go his hold, and he would have killed the stallion, sure, if it had not torn itself away, leaving a big bit of skin and flesh in the jack's mouth. The stallion went up the valley again like a flash, and the jack turned off and went on grazing as if nothing had happened. Jacks don't have a chance in towns; but give them a free hand out on the plains, and I tell you they are just choke-full of sense. But it is getting dark, and I am first on guard, so I must be off."
The other three men who had been told off for guard had each brought in a horse and fastened the ends of their ropes to picket pins driven into the ground, so that they could graze a little and yet be near at hand when the time came to relieve the guard.
"How do you know when to wake?"
"It is habit," Broncho Harry said. "One gets to wake up just at the right time, and if you ain't there within a quarter of an hour of the time you ought to be, you are likely to hear of it. One of the guards will ride in, and talk pretty straight to you, or like enough he will drop his rope round your foot or arm, and give you a jerk that will send you ten yards. When you have been woke up once or twice like that, there ain't much fear of your over-sleeping yourself. Ah! there is black Sam's accordion."
Black Sam was the cook, a merry good-tempered negro, and the outfit which secured Sam with the waggon considered itself in luck. Cow-boys are very fond of music, and Sam's accordion helped to while away the evening. For the next two hours there was singing and choruses, and then the men rolled themselves in their blankets with their feet to the fire, and the camp was soon asleep.
The next morning at daybreak the cow-boys started in pairs; two of them accompanied the waggon in charge of the spare horses, the rest went in various directions to hunt up cattle.
Before nightfall they had collected fifty or sixty cattle, mostly in bunches of threes and fours. At least a third of the number were calves by their mother's side. Some of them were only captured after a long chase, as they ran with a swiftness far beyond anything of which Hugh could have supposed cattle to be capable.