‘At least, stay off him till I try him out for a few days.’
Bob was sincere in his attempt to make the rat-tail safe for his son, but the toughest saddle-sessions he had ever known, followed in the next ten days. Where the ordinary outlaw left off with sun-fish and rail-fence, the old gray opened fresh spontaneities. One of the last things he did with Bob forked, was to make a quarter-mile sprint toward a low-hanging cottonwood limb, the idea being to rake off his tormentor, which he carried out. Another time when Bob persisted several seconds longer than usual, the rat-tail came out of a buckling snap—to fling himself on the ground. The day came when Bob Leadley, cool-eyed, a smile on his lips, would have preferred to stand up and be shot at, than mount the gray monster again, but that’s what he did, it being his code. That day Rat-tail plunged into a dobe wall and left Bart’s father on the inside of a crowded chicken yard with a broken leg.
‘I should have done what Letchie told me, Bart,’ Bob said that night. ‘He ain’t a man-killer just; he’s a man-eater. You’ll have to leave him alone from now on.’
‘You tried hookin’ him, the way they did over in the Cup Q. It makes him crazy. He ain’t crazy natural, his mouth’s tender. He’s been driven crazy. He needs humorin’, Dad.’
Anger flamed up in the father. He had been a horse-hand all his life. ‘I say keep off him, from now on.’
Three days later Mort Cotton came into the cabin, his bushy eyebrows showing curiously white. ‘I hate to tell on the kid, Bob, but it’ll get to you anyway,’ he said. ‘He’s been riding that rat-tail on a hackamore—he’s ridin’ him now. And what I’m gettin’ at is, he ain’t havin’ trouble.’
Bob’s face turned to the wall. He had many days to think it out while his leg was in boards.... It was disobedience, but had he been right? Didn’t Bart have something on the gray others hadn’t—with other horses, too, perhaps? It wasn’t a matter of just sitting a horse. Bob knew without vanity he could do that as well as most men. It was something new; not to be expressed. He had seen the deformed look of the gray’s head straighten out as Bart drew near; the red flame of the eye die down. Bart had something on him—a new feel with a horse.
‘I belong to the old school,’ he muttered. ‘All we know is that a hoss has to be broke; that a hoss is ruined that once gets his own way. Bart ain’t a part of that. He makes a hoss forget his own way. He gives him his courage back. But it’s disobedience—I dasn’t let Bart get away with it. They’d think I was crazy—if I didn’t get rid of the rat-tail.’
Mort Cotton took the old outlaw back to the Cup Q as a led-horse.