“Whene’er I take my rides abroad,
How many calves I see;
And, as I brand them properly,
They all belong to me,”
said Bell.
“How I should like to see a rodeo!” sighed Elsie. “I can’t imagine how the vaqueros can fling the reata while they are riding at full speed.”
“It isn’t so very wonderful,” said Polly, nonchalantly; “the most ordinary people can learn it; why! your brother Jack can lasso almost as well as a Mexican.”
“And I can ‘lass’ any stationary object myself,” cried Bell; “a hitching-post, or even a door-knob; I can do it two or three times out of ten.”
“That shows immense skill,” answered Jack, “but, as the thing you want to ‘lass’ never does stay still, and as it is absolutely necessary to catch it more than three times out of ten, you probably wouldn’t make a name and fortune as a vaquero. Juan Capistrano, by the way, used to be famous with the lariat. I had heard of his adventure with a bull on the island of Santa Rosa, and I asked him about it to-day; but he had so exhausted himself telling stories to Bell that he had very few words for me. You see there was a bull, on Santa Rosa island, so wild that they wanted to kill him; but nobody could do it, though he was a terror to any one who ventured on the island. They called him ‘Antiguelo,’ because of his long horns and long tail. He was such a terrible fighter that all the vaqueros were afraid to lass’ him, for he always broke away with the lariat. You see a horse throws a bull by skill and not by strength, of course. You can choke almost any bull; but this one was too smart! he would crouch on his haunches and pull back until the rope nearly choked him and then suddenly ‘make’ for the horse. Juan Capistrano had a splendid horse—you see as much depends on the horse as the man in such a case—and he came upon Antiguelo on the Cerro Negro and lass’d him. Well, did he fight? I asked. ‘Si, Señor.’ Well, what happened? ‘Yo lo maté’ (I killed him), he said, with a shrug of his shoulders, and that’s all I could get out of Juan regarding his adventure.”
“But you haven’t done your share, you lazy boy,” objected Bell. “You must tell us more.”
“What do you want to hear? I am up on all the animal and vegetable life of Southern California, full of interesting information concerning its old customs, can give you Spanish names for all the things that come up in ordinary conversation, and am the only man present who can make a raw-hide reata,” said Jack, modestly.
“Go on and tell us how, O great and wise reatero,” said Bell.
“I’ll tell you that myself,” said Elsie, “for I’ve seen him do it dozens of times, when he should have been studying his little lessons. He takes a big piece of raw hide, cuts a circle right out of the middle, and then cuts round and round this until he has one long continuous string, half an inch wide. He then stretches it and scrapes the hair off with a knife or a piece of glass, gets it into four strands, and braids it ‘round.’”