“What do you think of them?” asked the Chief, proudly, as he rested one foot on a fence rail, and looked at the lot with loving eyes. “They are my special hobby, girls. I always liked a fine horse even when I was a youngster, but I never saw any to compare with my beauties over yonder. I keep weeding them out, and breaking in the ones that don’t seem fit for the royal family, as it were. They all know me, too. Watch.” He put his fingers to his lips and blew a shrill, far-reaching whistle. Every neck lifted at the call, heads were turned towards him, and some whinnied anxiously. Then one broke into a run, and the rest followed.
“Oh, oh, just look at them come,” cried Polly, enthusiastically. “See their manes float on the wind, and how light they are.”
“Many a time I’ve come across a drove of them feeding on a good plain, and have watched until my own horse would give the alarm to them, and off they’d all go like that. It was hard catching them, and hard breaking them afterwards, but those that did, got horses with the speed of the wind in their hoofs, and the strength of the hills in their muscles. The desert breed is the only one that matches it, I’m thinking.”
“Who takes care of them?” asked Ted.
“The boys. I’ve five of them. I used to try to do it all myself, but they fare better and so do I, if I keep away. Besides, there’s plenty to be doing down at the home ranch. Over yonder, a few miles more, are the cattle, and some more of the boys. There’s about five hundred head. I used to have a larger herd, in the old Texan trail days, but there are few real ranches left now. They’re all stockmen and farmers. I’ve got some of the last long-horned steers in the county, now, out yonder, and when I settled here, they were all Texans. I sold some youngsters to a farmer in Iowa, I remember, for yoke work, and he wrote back after he’d got them home, that he didn’t know what to do, because their horns were so wide he couldn’t get them into the barn. ‘Widen your barn door, you nester,’ I wrote him. ‘Don’t cut the horns. Cut the barn.’ And he did too.” The Chief laughed heartily over the recollection, and they all went back to where Mrs. Sandy was watching for them on the broad, cosy porch.
“Do just what you want to, girls,” she told them. “Go where you feel like going, and play that it is home for a day. Ted, I saw you looking longingly at the collection of hunting knives and guns in the long dining-room. Why don’t you take the girls in to see them? They are all trophies of Sandy’s Indian campaigns,” she added with pride.
There seemed to be no kitchen to speak of, in sight. The long sunny room at the back of the house was a great living-room and dining-room too. There was a huge rock fireplace that reached clear up to the rafters, and the walls were decorated with all sorts of treasures of the Chief. On one side were specimens of Indian beadwork. There were hunting bags made of leather with beautifully-beaded fronts, the beads woven in solidly in threads instead of being fastened to the cloth or leather. There were hunting jackets, heavily fringed and beaded richly, with elk teeth and eagle feathers, and bear claws fastened to them ornamentally.
“Here is the headdress of old Red Buck, a Sioux Chief,” Sandy told them. He held it up so they could see that it was as tall as he was, a great cascade of eagle feathers. “The day I saw him in battle, he wore nothing but this, and another strip about his waist, but he was so heavily painted that he looked fully dressed. The others turned their war ponies about, and ran at the finish, when they saw the cavalry closing in on them, but he stood his ground, and stood yelling defiance at us, and shooting arrows until a bullet caught him, and he fell back from his pony.”
“What did the pony do?” asked Polly.
“Stood over his master, with lowered head, and whinnied to him. We found the two of them that way, and I stopped to take the headdress. He was a brave old lad, that redskin. I honor him for standing his ground alone with a whole troop of United States cavalry swooping down on him. That elk head up yonder is the biggest ever shot in our section. He used to come down and fairly taunt us early settlers with his royal kingship of these hills and valleys. I got him one moonlight night up at Ghost Lake, about seven miles above here, after nearly a week’s stalking.”