“Somebody pick out a soft place for him to land,” said Cleve, snubbing a rope around his hip. “If yuh find yourself goin’ plumb out of the State, Sleepy, cut the cinch. That saddle belongs to me.”
“Yore saddle don’t mean nothin’ to me,” grunted Sleepy. “Such things are below me, cowboy.”
They had the steer snubbed close to a post, and held it until Sleepy had adjusted himself in the saddle. Musical kicked open the gate, while Hashknife slacked the rope enough to slip it off.
Then the three cowboys raced for the corral fence, where they perched on the top pole and hugged their knees.
For several moments the steer stood still, its back humped, its nose close to the ground. Then it bawled shudderingly, a deep-toned wail, as though the sins of the world might be weighing upon its mind.
And then it moved so suddenly that Sleepy was almost unseated. Once around that dusty corral went the gyrating steer, lunging against the sides of the corral, bucking in its own peculiar, side-wheel way, and finally headed out through the open gateway.
Big Medicine and Lucy were on the front steps, watching the fun. Perhaps the steer had never done any bucking before, but it was wise, resourceful, and very wicked. So it picked out Big Medicine and Lucy as being part and parcel to this ignominy, and headed for them, still bucking and bawling.
Big Medicine and Lucy beat a retreat inside the doorway, while the steer sheered off slightly, just as a horse and rider came around the corner. It was McGurk, the revenue officer, who had ridden up unobserved from that side of the ranch-house, and had moved into view right in the path of the bucking steer.
McGurk and his horse were not a dozen feet away from the bucking steer, which was also covering distance at a rapid rate, and running blind, with its head nosing the dirt. And almost before McGurk could realize what was going on Sleepy threw up both hands, collided with McGurk, and was knocked backwards into a stunted rosebush, when the steer elected to go under McGurk’s mount.
The impact was so great that the big steer lifted the horse off its feet, dumping McGurk out of the saddle, and upended the frightened horse on its head, while the steer, minus the saddle, the cinch of which had snapped at the impact, went bawling into the hills.