A cheer swelled in the grand stand and died breathlessly away. McWilliams was setting a pace it would take a rare expert to equal. He was a trick rider, and all the spectacular feats that appealed to the onlooker were his. While his horse was wildly pitching, he drank a bottle of pop and tossed the bottle away. With the reins in his teeth he slipped off his coat and vest, and concluded a splendid exhibition of skill by riding with his feet out of the stirrups. He had been smoking a cigar when he mounted. Except while he had been drinking the pop it had been in his mouth from beginning to end, and, after he had vaulted from the pony’s back, he deliberately puffed a long smoke-spiral into the air, to show that his cigar was still alight. No previous rider had earned so spontaneous a burst of applause. “He’s ce’tainly a pure when it comes to riding,” acknowledged Bannister. “I look to see him get either first or second.”
“Whom do you think is his most dangerous rival?” Helen asked.
“My cousin is a straight-up rider, too. He’s more graceful than Mac, I think, but not quite so good on tricks. It will be nip and tuck.”
“How about your cousin’s cousin?” she asked, with bold irony.
“He hopes he won’t have to take the dust,” was his laughing answer.
The next rider suffered defeat irrevocably before he had been thirty seconds in the saddle. His mount was one of the most cunning of the outlaw ponies of the Northwest, and it brought him to grief by jamming his leg hard against the fence. He tried in vain to spur the bronco into the middle of the arena, but after it drove at a post for the third time and ground his limb against it, he gave up to the pain and slipped off.
“That isn’t fair, is it?” Helen asked of the young man sitting beside her.
He shrugged his lean, broad shoulders. “He should have known how to keep the horse in the open. Mac would never have been caught that way.”
“Jack Holloway on Rocking Horse,” the announcer shouted.
It took four men and two lariats to subdue this horse to a condition sufficiently tame to permit of a saddle being slipped on. Even then this could not be accomplished without throwing the bronco first. The result was that all the spirit was taken out of the animal by the preliminary ordeal, so that when the man from the Shoshone country mounted, his steed was too jaded to attempt resistance.