"What makes them shoot?" asked Janet.
"Well, sometimes it's to scare away bad men who might try to steal my cattle or horses, and again it's to scare the cattle themselves. You see," explained Uncle Frank, while the cowboys jumped from their horses and went to the bunk house to wash and get ready for supper, "a ranch is just like a big pasture that your Grandfather Martin has at Cherry Farm. Only my ranch is ever so much bigger than his pastures, even all of them put together. And there are very few fences around any of my fields, so the cattle or horses might easily stray off, or be taken.
"Because of that I have to hire men—cowboys they are called—to watch my cattle and horses, to see that they do not run away and that no white men or Indians come and run away with them.
"But sometimes the cattle take it into their heads to run away themselves. They get frightened—'stampeded' we call it—and they don't care which way they run. Sometimes a prairie fire will make them run and again it may be bad men—thieves. The cowboys have to stop the cattle from running away, and they do it by firing revolvers in front of them. So it wouldn't do to have real bullets in their guns when the cowboys are firing that way. They use blank cartridges, just as they did now to salute you when they came in."
"Is that what they did?" asked Teddy. "Saluted us?"
"That's it. They just thought they'd have a little fun with you—see if they could scare you, maybe, because you're what they call a 'tenderfoot,' Teddy."
"Pooh, I wasn't afraid!" declared Teddy, perhaps forgetting a little. "I liked it. It was like the Fourth of July!"
"I didn't like it," said Janet, with a shake of her curly head. "And what's a soft-foot, Uncle Frank?"
"A soft-foot? Oh, ho! I see!" he laughed. "You mean a tenderfoot! Well, that's what the Western cowboys call anybody from the East—where you came from. It means, I guess, that their feet are tender because they walk so much and don't ride a horse the way cowboys do. You see out here we folks hardly ever walk. If we've only got what you might call a block to go we hop on a horse and ride. So we get out of the way of walking.
"Now you Eastern folk walk a good bit—that is when you aren't riding in street cars and in your automobiles, and I suppose that's why the cowboys call you tender-feet. You don't mind, though, do you, Teddy?"