Collie nodded.
"I had rather you didn't," said Louise.
"Why?" asked Collie, tactlessly.
Louise did not answer, and Collie strode off feeling angry with himself and more than ever determined to risk breaking his neck to win the outlaw.
Boyar, the Moonstone pony, ran second in the finals. The buckskin of the Mexicans won first place. Collie collected his winnings indifferently. He grew ashamed of himself, realizing that a foolish and unwarrantable jealousy had led him into a species of disloyalty. He was a Moonstone rider. He had bet against the Moonstone pony, and her pony. He was about to ask one of the other boys to see to the horses when a tumult in the corrals drew his attention. He strolled over to the crowd, finding a place for himself on the corral bars.
Mat Gleason, superintendent of the Oro Ranch, loafed, his back against a post. Two men with ropes were following the roan pony round the corral. Presently a riata flipped out and fell. Inch by inch the outlaw was worked to the snubbing-post. One of the Oro riders seized the pony's ear in his teeth and, flinging his legs round her neck, hung, weighing her head down. There was the flash of teeth, a grunting tug at the cinchas, a cloud of dust, and Jasper Lane, foreman of the Oro outfit, was in the saddle. The cloud of dust, following the roan pony, grew denser. Above the dun cloud a sombrero swung to and fro fanning the outlaw's ears. Jasper Lane had essayed to ride the Yuma colt once before. His broken shoulder had set nicely, in fact, better than Bull O'Toole's leg which had been broken when the outlaw fell on him. Billy Squires, a young Montana puncher working for the Oro people, still carried his arm in a sling. All in all, the assembled company, as Brand Williams mildly put it, "were beginning to take notice of that copper-colored she-son of a cyclone."
Jasper Lane plied spurs and quirt. The visiting cowmen shrilled their delight. The pony was broncho from the end of her long, switching tail to the tip of her pink muzzle.
Following a quick tattoo of hoofs on the baked earth came a flash like the trout's leap for the fly—a curving plunge—the sound as of a breaking willow branch, and then palpitating silence.
The dun cloud of dust settled, disclosing the foam-flecked, sweat-blackened colt, oddly beautiful in her poised immobility. Near her lay Jasper Lane, face downward. The pony sniffed at his crumpled sombrero.