Used to working the wild, savage cattle of the brushland, the Mexicans trained their horses to spin away from the side on which a man mounted as soon as he lifted a foot to the stirrup. Though this saved many a vaquero from being gored by a ringy bull which he had just released after throwing and branding the beast, it took a good man to get on one of these horses. Each rider had a string of animals, and from his bunch Quartel had saddled a brown horse they called a trigueño. He knocked the reins loose of the corral post and snapped them over the trigueño's head. Then he checked the animal, pulling the nigh rein in till it twisted the trigueño's head down toward its shoulder so that the horse's action would be inhibited long enough for him to mount. As soon as Quartel raised his left foot, the trigueño tried to whirl, but that checking action held him long enough for Quartel to jam his foot in the stirrup and swing aboard in one violent movement. Then he released the tight rein and allowed the animal to spin toward the right.
From outside the cedar-post corral, Aforismo and several other vaqueros had goaded and prodded a blue bull until it was separated from the other bulls within the enclosure. As it neared the gate, Aforismo let down the drop bar.
In their natural state, running the brush, these cows were among the wildest animals of the world, and the several days this cut of bulls had spent penned up had put them in a frenzied rage. The blue stood there a moment, glaring suspiciously at the opening, pawing the ground. His great long curving horns had been scored and ripped and punched by the brush until it looked as if someone had hacked them over with a knife, and a pattern of scars formed a network across the gleaming lathered hide of his forequarters. From the side, he looked deceptively heavy, his length so extended that his back swayed, but as he lashed his tail and shifted around to display a rear view, his narrow hips and cat hams and ridgepole back became apparent. Abruptly, with a hoarse bellow, he lowered his head, and swinging it from side to side, galloped out of the gate.
Quartel yelled something, dug in with his Chihuahuas and whacked his quirt against the trigueño's rump at the same time. The brown horse burst into a headlong run, followed by most of the other vaqueros, shouting and yelling and snapping their quirts against leather chivarras and fancy charro pants. The blue bull had spotted an opening in the brush across the compound, and he shook the ground tearing for it. But the horsemen swiftly closed up on the animal. Quartel and another vaquero were bunched together in the lead. Quartel raked his trigueño with those huge Chihuahua guthooks, and the horse spurted ahead, drawing up beside the bull. Quartel leaned out of the saddle and made a grab for that lashing tail. But the blue bull jammed its forefeet into the ground and came to a jarring halt, plowing twin furrows in the earth. Quartel was several lengths on by before he could swing back in the saddle and pull his horse around; by that time the bull had turned in a half circle and cut for the brush.
The other vaquero had pulled up shorter than Quartel, and was in a position to run down the bull on its quarter. He was a tall, supple youth on a short-coupled horse they called a bayo coyote, its coat a buckskin color with a black line running down the spine, with a black mane and tail. Quartel spurred and quirted his trigueño in a last desperate effort to reach the bull first, but just at the edge of brush, the other vaquero pulled up beside the blue and leaned out to grab for that tail.
He caught its hairy end, and dallied it around his saddle horn, clapping the guthooks to his bayo coyote at the same time. The buckskin gave a spurt that pulled it ahead of the blue bull, and just as the horse smashed into the first thicket, the tail of the bull snapped taut, yanking its hind feet from beneath it. The vaquero tore the tail off his horn and hunched forward with his arm before his face all at the same time, and as he disappeared into the thicket the ground shook with the bull's falling. Huerta had come down from the house, and he moved in behind Crawford.
"I understand a good man can break the bull's neck every time," he said. "Why don't you try it, Crawford?"
Crawford's hands closed tightly, and he did not look at Huerta. The inside of his mouth was dry and cottony as he watched the vaquero come back through the mesquite into the open, prancing his bayo coyote proudly.
"You better go back to herding dogies, Quartel," the vaquero grinned, "and leave the grown ones to men."