“I had to take to the horn and hang on some,” he admitted.
Ay, he had clung there desperately while the broncho pitched about the river-bed, whither Reb had retired for safety and to escape spectators. But at the next saddle Corazón was less violent; at the third, recovering from the stunning shocks and bruisings of the first day, he was a fiend; and then, on the following morning, he did not pitch at all. Reb rode him every day to sap the superfluous vigor in Corazón’s iron frame and he taught him as well as he could the first duties of a cowhorse. Finding that his new master never punished him unless he undertook to dispute his authority, the sorrel grew tractable and began to take an interest in his tasks.
“He’s done broke,” announced Reb; “I’ll have him bridle-wise in a week. He’ll make some roping horse. Did you see him this evening? I swan--”
They scoffed good-naturedly; but Reb proceeded on the assumption that Corazón was meant to be a roping horse, and schooled him accordingly. As for the sorrel, he took to the new pastime with delight. Within a month nothing gave him keener joy than to swerve and crouch at the climax of a sprint and see a cow thrown heels over head at the end of the rope that was wrapped about his saddle-horn.
The necessity of contriving to get three meals a day took me elsewhere, and I did not see Corazón again for three years. Then, one Sunday afternoon, Big John drew me from El Paso to Juarez on the pretense of seeing a grand, an extraordinary, a most noble bull-fight, in which the dauntless Favorita would slay three fierce bulls from the renowned El Carmen ranch, in “competency” with the fearless Morenito Chico de San Bernardo; and a youth with a megaphone drew us both to a steer-roping contest instead. We agreed that bull-fighting was brutal on the Sabbath.
“I’ll bet it’s rotten,” remarked Big John pessimistically, as we took our seats. “I could beat ’em myself.”
As he scanned the list, his face brightened. Among the seventeen ropers thereon were two champions and a possible new one in Raphael Fraustro, the redoubtable vaquero from the domain of Terrazas.
“And here’s Reb!” roared John--he is accustomed to converse in the tumult of the branding-pen--“I swan, he’s entered from Monument.”
Shortly afterwards the contestants paraded, wonderfully arrayed in silk shirts and new handkerchiefs.
“Some of them ain’t been clean before in a year,” was John’s caustic comment. “There’s Slim; I KNOW he hasn’t.”