"To rope that beast before he runs a season's flesh off the teams. There's a riata in the office."
"Better shoot him," Smythe counselled. "Here! come back!" But he was already half-way across the clearing.
Choosing his time, he passed from the smithy to the bunk-house, thence to the cook-house, and so working from building to building under the eyes of his men, he gained the office at last and shot in, barely escaping the mad cavalcade. As he emerged, coiling the riata, Smythe's gaze drew to a second actor in this woodland drama.
When the poker players broke for cover, Michigan Red had paused long enough to pocket the stakes along with his winnings, then picking up the blanket he walked over to the cook-house, and had watched all from the angle formed by the jutting corner logs. "A bit closer would have suited better," he had grumbled, as Carter's last rush carried him from under the hoofs. Now he commented: "Going to rope him, are you? Not if I know it." Knowledge of his fellows' liability to lapses of hero-worship inhered in his conclusion. "If there's to be gran'stan' plays I'll make 'em myself."
"Fools!" he snarled, as the beat of feet warned him that the strikers on the roof were watching Carter, who had taken position behind the next corner. He heard also the swish of the circling noose, its quickened whir as the horses swooped around on the next lap; then, just as the band passed, he sprang out, uttering a sudden harsh command, directly in the stallion's path.
A desperate play, it drew gambler's luck. A frontier superstition has it that the equine eye magnifies objects, and whether or no the red teamster with his pale-green face loomed in the stallion's sight as some huge and passionate fiend, he reared back on strung haunches, ploughing the sod in a desperate effort to stop; and while he hung in mid-air, Michigan stepped and threw his blanket, matador-fashion, over the ugly head. As the brute settled on all-fours and stood shivering, Michigan turned, grinning, to reap the fruit of his daring.
But his grin quickly faded, for, flashing on to his purpose, Carter had swung and roped the rat-tailed mare, the stallion's mate, as the band flew by. Worse! Michigan choked. Almost every man in camp had a grudge against the mare, some vicious lunge or graze from her snapping teeth, so a dozen strikers had jumped and were helping Carter to choke her down, while the others cheered them on with approving laughter.
Furious, he yelled: "What's the matter with you chaps up there? Taken to roosting like chickens? I'd like a picture of the bunch, it ud pass anywhere for a Methodist convention. An' you fellows quit yanking that mare. 'Tain't tug-o'-war you're playing." But he made small headway against the uproarious tide of yells and laughter, and, remembering his snub, Carrots Smith shouted back, "She's doin' most of the pulling, an' if she wants to hang, why let her."
Worst of all, it was Carter who finally interfered on behalf of the struggling brute, and Michigan chafed at the ready obedience accorded his orders.
"Thought you fellows was on strike?" he growled at Brady, the Irish teamster, as he retied the stallion in the horse lines.