"A queer hitch-up you've got there," murmured the dapper little man, as he halted near the group.
"Yes; and the bull is going to get away pretty soon, according to all predictions," replied Tom Reade. "Though, perhaps, Mr. Hibbert, you may have an idea that hasn't occurred to our addled brains."
"That's hardly likely," murmured the young man, as he began to tie a running noose in one end of the rope with an air of preoccupation. "I don't know very much about cattle."
"I suppose not," Tom nodded.
"The very little that I know about the beasts," Hibbert went on quietly, "was what I picked up during my college vacations, when my good old Dad sent me west to rough it on a ranch. I'm not a cowboy at all, you know. All I know about them I discovered merely by sitting in saddle and watching the cowboys."
Now Hibbert slipped around to the rear of the bull, which, for the moment, was behaving very quietly.
"Look out!" yelled Prescott suddenly, for Hibbert, slipping in closer, had begun to tease the beast's left quarter. Mr. Bull, as though resenting such familiarity with all his force, reared, plunged, snorted. The rope hitched about the tree seemed likely to snap at any moment.
Just as the bull came down on its hind legs, its forefeet raised in the air, Hibbert made a swishing throw.
"Hurrah!" broke swiftly from the onlookers, for the dapper young man had made a throw that had roped the animal's forelegs together. Hibbert made a sudden haul-in on the rope, with the result that the bulky beast crashed sideways, falling.
Then, all in a twinkling Hibbert leaped in, hobbling the thrown beast effectively. Having done this he made a few knots in the rope with workmanlike indifference.