I walks over and takes a look. Looks like one of Sam Holt’s rat-tailed broncs, but the rider—whooee! I don’t blame Magpie for dropping the bacon. I’d ’a’ dropped a stick of dynamite if I’d had one.
I’ll begin at the top and work on down. First we have a hat. She looks like a cross between a ordinary hard hat and a campaign lid, being as she’s sort of flat on the top. Under said hat cometh hair, which seems to grow straight out.
Then we have a pair of funeral-rimmed specs forking the longest, skinniest nose I ever seen. I feels that it must blow about the same note as the stopped-down E string on a fiddle. The chin of the critter seems to be so long that the weight of it holds his mouth open.
We have with us now the neck. To speak like a poet I’d say that he had the neck of a swan. Maybe not so graceful, but longer. His shoulders shows a heap of neglect, and from there he just sort of slopes off to his feet, which is some slope, if you asks me.
Riding with his elbows has made his sleeves pull up almost to his shoulders, and hanging on with his knees has pulled up the legs of his pants until he’s setting on most of ’em. He ain’t anything for a drinking man to look at—if he likes the taste of liquor.
Me and Magpie stands there sort of weak-like and watches him search his pockets. He ain’t said a word yet. The more pockets he searches the less he seems to find. He grunts and reaches for his hip pocket, the same of which seems to bend his legs backwards until his heels catch in that bronc’s flanks.
Zowie!
That rat-tailed bronc resents such familiarity, with the result that said apparition lands setting down in our front yard while the insulted bronc wends its way home.
I plumb forgot to mention that this person carried a little valise on the saddle-horn. Yes, it came off with him.
He sets there on the chip-pile blinking like a old owl, and then he produces an envelope from his hip pocket. Then he adjusts his specs and peers up at us.