"For," he told himself grimly, "if I'm going to stick my nose in that man's town I'm going to have a horse between my knees that knows how to do something more than creep! And when it comes to horses there's only one real horse I ever saw. I got you, Comet, you old son-of-a-gun!"
And his rope flew out and its wide noose landed with much precision, drawing tight about the neck of a great, lean barrelled, defiant-eyed four-year-old that in the midst of its headlong flight stopped with feet bunched together before the rope had grown taut. The animal, standing now like a horse cut from a block of grey granite, chiselled by the hands of a great sculptor who at the same time was a great lover of equine perfection, swung about upon its captor, its eyes blazing, just a little quiver of the clean-cut nostrils showing the red satin of the skin lining them. The mane was like a tumbled silken skein, the ears dainty and small and keen pointed, the chest splendidly deep and strong; the forelegs small, so slender that to a man who did not know a horse they would have seemed fragile but only because they were all bone and sinew like steel and muscle hardened and stripped clean of the last milligram of fat, as exquisite as the perfect ankle of a high bred woman.
"Part greyhound and part steam engine and part devil!" Thornton muttered with vast approval shining in his eyes. "And all horse! A man could ride you right through hell, Little Horse, and come out the other side and never smell your hair burn!"
He drew saddle and bridle from the animal he had been riding and turned it loose. Then coiling his rope as he went, he came up to Comet's high-lifted head. With much evident distaste but with what looked like too much pride to struggle in an encounter in which he knew that he was to be overcome, the big grey accepted the hard Spanish bit. He allowed, too, the saddle to be thrown on him, only a quick little quivering of the tense flanks and a twitching of the skin upon his back showing that he felt and resented. And then with his master's weight upon him, his master's softened voice in his ear, a hard hand very gently stroking the hot shoulder, Comet shook his head, a great sigh expanded the deep lungs, and he was the perfect saddle horse with too much sense to rebel further at the knowledge that after all he is a horse and the man who bestrides him is a man. And Buck Thornton, because he knew this animal and loved him, slackened the reins a little, sensed the tensing of the powerful muscles slipping like pliant steel through satin sheaths, turned the proud head toward the south and felt the rush of air whipping back his hat brim, stinging his face as they shot out across the rolling hills.
When Comet had had his run, racing through the other herds that flung up their heads to look at him and the first half mile had sped away behind, Thornton coaxed him down into a gentle gallop, swearing at him with much soft and deep affection.
"Easy, Little Horse," he soothed. "Easy. We're going to Dead Man's. We'll go in slow and watching where we put our feet, all rested and quick on the trigger and ready to come out … if we want to! … like winning a race."
And Comet, snorting his dislike of any conservation of strength and energy, nevertheless obeyed. So it was a little after three o'clock when they entered the crooked, narrow street which gives a bad town a bad name.
The town had shaken off the lethargy of its morning sleep: there were many men in the street, some riding back and forth, disdaining to walk the distance of a hundred yards from a saloon they had just left to the saloon to which they were going, some sitting their horses in the shade, lounging in the saddle as a man may lounge in an arm chair, some idled on foot at the swinging doors, while many others made a buzz of deep throated voices at the bars and over the gaming tables. As Buck Thornton, riding slowly, his hat back upon his head, his eyes ranging to right and left, came into the street where Winifred Waverly had entered it last week, more than one man lifted his eyebrows on seeing him and wondered what business had brought him here. For the memory of his meeting with the Bedloes was still green, the scars which the Kid wore on his right wrist and his left arm were still fresh, and this town was the Bedloes' town in more ways than one.
He nodded to a few men, spoke to fewer, for here was he more a stranger than he was in Dry Town. Riding straight to the Brown Bear Saloon he swung down. He left his horse, trained to stand by the hour for him, at the edge of the board sidewalk, the bridle reins caught around the horn of the saddle, moved at an even pace through the men at the door and went inside.
A dozen men stood at the long bar, big men and little, dark men and light, of this nationality and that, but alike in the one essential thing that they were of the type by which the far-out places are wrested from the wilderness of God and made part of the wildness of man, hard men of tongue, of hand, of nature, hard drinkers, hard fighters. Gunmen, to the last man of them, who live with a gun always, by a gun often enough, who are dropping fast before the onrush of the civilization for which they themselves have made the way, but who will daily walk over their graves until the glimmer of steel rails runs into the last of the far places, until there be no longer wide, unfenced miles where cattle run free and rugged mountain sides into which men dip to bring out red and yellow gold.