Jill and Ritchie joined the expedition to go over the plain in search of wild horses. Peter preferred to stay at home. He had no desire, he said, to raise his bumps again. I stayed with Peter to keep him company.
Jill and Ritchie were gone for three days, and I was getting uneasy when the whole cavalcade reappeared.
“Terribly wild work,” said Ritchie as he entered the log-house. “Ain’t I tired just?”
“Oh, I’m not a bit,” said Jill, coming in behind him.
Jill looked flushed and excited, and confessed to being delightfully hungry. He proved his words, too, when we all sat down to dinner.
The Indians had brought in with them five poor, dejected-looking animals that had been thrown with the lasso, and altogether used far more cruelly than I care to describe.
But these horses soon took to their food; then the breaking-in process was commenced. After being tormented until perfectly wild, and their strength almost quite expended with kicking and plunging, they were forcibly bitted and bridled. An Indian then waiting his chance would spring boldly on the bare-back of a steed, and the battle ’twixt man and beast commenced in downright earnest. The way the Indian breaker stuck to his horse, despite his rearing, plunging, and buck-jumping, was truly marvellous. If he was thrown, which he sometimes was, he sprang to his feet again, those around jeering and laughing at him, and though bruised and bleeding, vaulted once more on the horse’s back.
The battle had but one ending: total exhaustion of the horse, and victory of the Indian.
Only one poor animal escaped thorough subjection. This steed reared too far, fell backwards, and his skull coming against a piece of rock with a sickening thud, he never moved a leg again.
We had that horse for dinner.