"When you tied up this horse's foot, and gave him a shove, so that he see he wasn't very steady on his legs, you gave him something to think about, and he forgot all about that he didn't want to be bridled, and was just thinking of keeping his right side up."
"Well, Hugh, it's a mighty good thing to know that about taking up a horse's leg. I was awful mad when I couldn't bridle that horse, and felt as if I'd like to kill him; then when I kicked at him and missed him, and sat down, I felt what a fool I'd been, and I was madder than ever."
"Well, it don't pay for a fellow to lose his head. A man wants to keep his wits about him all the time, and when you get mad and try to fight a horse, whether it's a bad horse or just a scared horse, you're kind o' losing the advantage that a man has over an animal, and putting yourself down on his level."
"That's so, isn't it?" said Jack, "I never thought of it just that way before."
"Yes, that is so; the only thing that a man has got that's much use to him is his sense; a buffalo is bigger and stronger; a deer is swifter; a wolf can crawl around better out of sight, and all them animals are better armed than a man is. It's his sense that gives a man the pull on all of 'em, and makes him able to creep up on 'em and kill 'em, if he wants to; makes him able to tame horses, and makes him smart enough to get up guns and gunpowder, and railways and all them things. So, whatever you do, son, you want to try to hang on to your sense, and never lose it even for a minute. A man that's got a level head, that isn't away up in the air one minute, and away down to the ground another, is the man that's going to come out ahead."
As Hugh finished speaking, they rounded a point of the bluffs and saw before them a group of half-a-dozen box-elder trees, with a few clumps of willows growing beneath them. "There," said Hugh, "if we put that skull up in that thickest box-elder tree it's pretty sure to stay there until we come back. Nothing will bother it except the magpies, and all they'll do will be to clean off the meat there is on it."
They stopped under the tree, and dismounted. Hugh pointed upward, and Jack, obeying his gesture, quickly scrambled up to the lowest of the branches. Hugh threw him the end of his rope, which Jack caught, and carrying it, climbed up in the thick foliage.
"Now," said Hugh, "you haul up the skull, and hang it by the horns, close to the trunk, across two branches. See that it is so firm that it can't blow down; or, if you can't make it firm, tie it with these buckskin strings that I'll put around the horn." Hugh took two long thongs of buckskin from his pocket, wound them around the horns, and then lifting the skull as high as he could, Jack slowly hauled it up to where he was.
"Here's a bully place," he said, "a branch to hold each horn, and a strong, dry stub coming out, that will support the chin."
"All right," said Hugh, "maybe you'd better tie it, anyhow, with them strings; then we'll be doubly sure that it will stay there."