"That old hair trunk never had the jazz to be any cinch binder. Who told you he was?"
I named names—all I could remember. Almost everyone on the ranch had passed me the friendly warning, and never had I saddled the brute without a thrill.
"Sure! Them chuckleheads always got to tell everybody something. It's a wonder they ain't sent you in to the Chink to borrow his meat auger, or out to the blacksmith shop for a left-handed monkey wrench, or something. Come on!"
So that was it! Just another bit of stale ranch humour—alleged humour—as if it could be at all funny to have me saddle this wreck with the tenderest solicitude morning after morning!
"Just one moment!" I said briskly.
I think Dandy Jim realized that everything of a tender nature between us was over. Some curious and quite charming respect I had been wont to show him was now gone out of my manner. He began to do deep breathing exercises before I touched the cinch. I pulled with the strength of a fearless man. Dandy Jim forthwith inflated his chest like a gentleman having his photograph taken in a bathing suit. I waited, apparently foiled. I stepped back, spoke to Ma Pettengill of the day's promise, and seemed carelessly to forget what I was there for. Slowly Dandy Jim deflated himself; and then, on the fair and just instant, I pulled. I pulled hard and long. The game was won. Dandy Jim had now the waist of that matron wearing the Sveltina corset, over in the part of the magazine where the stories die away. I fearlessly bestrode him and the day was on.
I opened something less than a hundred gates, so that we could take our way through the lower fields. Ma Pettengill said she must see this here Tilton and this here Snell, and have that two hundred yards of fence built like they had agreed to, as man to man; and no more of this here nonsense of putting it off from day to day.
She was going to talk straight to them because, come Thursday, she had to turn a herd of beef cattle into that field.
Then I opened a few dozen more gates and we were down on the flats. Here the lady spied a coyote, furtively skirting some willows on our left. So, for a few merry miles, we played the game of coyote. It is a simple game to learn, but requires a trained eye. When one player sees a coyote the other becomes indebted to him in the sum of one dollar.
This sport dispelled the early morning gloom that had beset me. I won a dollar almost immediately. It may have been the same coyote, as my opponent painfully suggested; but it showed at a different breach in the willows, and I was firm.