CHAPTER I

“La-A-A-dies an’ gen’l’mun”

All through the exhibition the two sat unmoved; yet on the whole it was the best Wild West show that ever stirred sawdust in Madison Square Garden and it brought thunders of applause from the crowded house.  Even if the performance could not stir these two, at least the throng of spectators should have drawn them, for all New York was there, from the richest to the poorest; neither the combined audiences of a seven-day race, a prize-fight, or a community singing festival would make such a cosmopolitan assembly.

All Manhattan came to look at the men who had lived and fought and conquered under the limitless skies of the Far West, free men, wild men—­one of their shrill whoops banished distance and brought the mountain desert into the very heart of the unromantic East.  Nevertheless from all these thrills these two men remained immune.

To be sure the smaller tilted his head back when the horses first swept in, and the larger leaned to watch when Diaz, the wizard with the lariat, commenced to whirl his rope; but in both cases their interest held no longer than if they had been old vaudevillians watching a series of familiar acts dressed up with new names.

The smaller, brown as if a thousand fierce suns and winds had tanned and withered him, looked up at last to his burly companion with a faint smile.

“They’re bringing on the cream now, Drew, but I’m going to spoil the dessert.”

The other was a great, grey man whom age apparently had not weakened but rather settled and hardened into an ironlike durability; the winds of time or misfortune would have to break that stanch oak before it would bend.

He said:  “We’ve half an hour before our train leaves.  Can you play your hand in that time?”

“Easy.  Look at ’em now—­the greatest gang of liars that never threw a diamond hitch!  Ride?  I’ve got a ten-year kid home that would laugh at ’em all.  But I’ll show ’em up.  Want to know my little stunt?”

“I’ll wait and enjoy the surprise.”

The wild riders who provoked the scorn of the smaller man were now gathering in the central space; a formidable crew, long of hair and brilliant as to bandannas, while the announcer thundered through his megaphone: 

“La-a-a-dies and gen’l’mun!  You see before you the greatest band of subduers and breakers of wild horses that ever rode the cattle ranges.  Death defying, reckless, and laughing at peril, they have never failed; they have never pulled leather.  I present ‘Happy’ Morgan!”

Happy Morgan, yelling like one possessed of ten shrill-tongued demons, burst on the gallop away from the others, and spurring his horse cruelly, forced the animal to race, bucking and plunging, half way around the arena and back to the group.  This, then, was a type of the dare-devil horse breaker of the Wild West?  The cheers travelled in waves around and around the house and rocked back and forth like water pitched from side to side in a monstrous bowl.