They hung by their heels while the ponies scoured the plains, running in a circle. Two rode swiftly, side by side, and picked up a third who lay as though dead on the prairie, and bore him off at full gallop. Two rode from opposite sides and actually changed ponies as they passed!
“Now, white boy,” said the big fellow whom Chet wanted to see in centrefield. “Show what him do.”
Dig was nothing loath. He stripped Poke and brought him out with neither saddle nor bridle. Meanly as the black horse sometimes acted, this was not an occasion when he was likely to play the runaway.
He seemed to understand that there was a contest, and he liked to show off just as well as did his master. The presence of the ponies made him snort and toss his mane; and in the corral he would doubtless have tried to bite them. But he obeyed his master’s voice and hand—even his whistle—now, with most exemplary promptness.
Dig did not try to equal the Indian boys’ tricks; but he had others of his own. He mounted and dismounted while Poke was on the run. He made the mustang lie down under him and roll over, Dig standing on the horse all the time and never once touching the ground.
He rode both kneeling and standing on the mustang’s bare back. Then he cinched on the saddle, dropped his kerchief on the sod and picked it up with his teeth, Poke running like a wolf meanwhile. Amoshee and his friends hailed this last feat as the greatest and they all shook Dig by the hand.
“Guess they think I’m some pumpkins,” Dig said to his chum. “I reckon there isn’t anything a redskin can do that a white man can’t beat him at.”
Of course, he said this when none of the visitors could hear him. Now the Indian lads wanted to see Chet shoot. Probably Amoshee had told them that young Havens excelled in that.
The Indian boys themselves had only the cheapest kind of rifles, and no pistols at all. The chums had their revolvers, and the heavy rifle that Chet had brought with him was almost the equal of a cannon for distance. And the accuracy of its shooting was far superior to that of the Indians’ guns.
So Chet pitted himself with his pistol against the rifles of Amoshee and his friends. At distance marks the Indian boys thought they had Chet beat; but after they had all plugged away at the target, none of them hitting very near the centre, Chet paced ten paces back of the line from which they had shot and came within half an inch of the bull’s-eye at his first shot. With his remaining five bullets he riddled the target.