“Yep,” assented Gallagher, in a toneless voice. “Better take th’ sorrel, Sargint.”
Ellis glanced up sharply, but the rancher’s face was set like an ugly, expressionless mask, and he gleaned nothing there.
“Why?” he inquired.
“Pitches some,” said the other drily and, with calculating inference, “the sorrel, he’s gentle. I kin ride him.”
Ellis hesitated a moment. He was hardly to be classed in the same category as a greenhorn, whom ignorance, taunt, or bravado will often provoke into climbing onto a bad horse, with equally bad results, but his reputation as a rider was at stake, for he knew Gallagher’s tongue was prone to wag at times. The latter’s last words—“The sorrel, he’s gentle!”—rankled a little, and his decision was made with an unconscious snort of contempt, as he dragged at the latigo straps and drew the cinches taut.
“Pitches, does he?” he mumbled to himself. All right, then! He would show Mr. “Dog-face” Gallagher something. And bending down he buckled on the big, straight-shanked, Mexican spurs. “Gimme yore quirt, Gallagher!”
Crossing the split reins carefully in the palm of his left hand and catching the cheek-strap of the bridle, he reached out his right and guided his foot cautiously into the stirrup, eyeing the buckskin closely the while. The animal stood ominously quiet. Grasping the horn he swung lightly and warily into the saddle and settled his feet home. Still no movement from the motionless horse. Vaguely uneasy, he clucked and gave it a light touch with the spurs. The effect was magical. The ears suddenly flattened. A ripple ran along the black-striped back and as, with a hoarse, grunting scream the buckskin dropped its head and bucked into the air, in a flash Benton realized that he was on one of the worst horses it had ever been his lot to tackle.
“Oh—o-ooh—he-e—s-ss—a-ah!” in bitter bodily anguish, he groaned, as again and again the horse rocketed and propped, stiff and hard with terrible impact, and with a jarring side-shake that seemed to shiver his very soul. The blood burst from his nose and mouth under the constant violent concussions and he felt deathly sick. Still the snapping, whalebone-like back rose and descended, “sun-fishing” in midair with a curious upward flirt of the rump that was well-nigh irresistible, causing the Sergeant’s hand to swing up towards the horn more than once, and but for the fact of Gallagher watching, he would have “pulled leather” without shame. “Not grain fed.... Can’t keep this up much longer!” he gasped to himself. And shifting slightly in the saddle he threw all his dead weight on to the nigh fore-leg. It was an old trick that Ellis had often used in his younger and more elastic days, and by degrees he became conscious between the twisting, jerking leaps of the bucking fury under him, that the animal was weakening.
Its resistance provoked a wild, unreasoning wave of anger to surge through him, driving the remnants of his sick faintness before it, and raising his hand he quirted and raked the still pitching buckskin with a ferocity that finally drove it to a sweating standstill.
“Go to it, d—n yu’!” he yelled, but the horse had had enough and only broke into an easy trot around the corral. Swinging out of the saddle, he stood for a moment swaying, dazed from the terrific ordeal he had undergone.