“I was tellin’ you that there horse was ostypathed, so to speak, plumb to a razor edge, and I was sayin’ that he went off on a even start.  Then what did he do?  Run?  No, he didn’t run.  He just sort of passed away from the place where he started at.  Our Greaser, he sees the race is all over, and like any fool cow puncher, he must get frisky.  Comin’ down the homestretch, only needin’ about one more jump—­for it ain’t above a quarter of a mile—­Jose, he stands up in his stirrups and pulls off his hat, and just whangs old Pinto over the head with it, friendly like, to show him there ain’t no coldness.

“We never did rightly know what happened at that time.  The Greaser admits he may have busted off the fastenin’ of that single blinder down Pinto’s nose.  Anyhow, Pinto runs a few short jumps, and then stops, lookin’ troubled.  The next minute he hides his face on the Greaser and there is a glimpse of bright, glad sunlight on the bottom of Jose’s moccasins.  Next minute after that Pinto is up in the grandstand among the ladies, and there he sits down in the lap of the Governor’s wife, which was among them present.

“There was time, even then, to lead him down and over the line, but before we could think of that he falls to buckin’ sincere and conscientious, up there among the benches, and if he didn’t jar his osshus structure a heap then, it wasn’t no fault of his’n.  We all run up in front of the grandstand, and stood lookin’ up at Pinto, and him the maddest, scaredest, cross-eyedest horse I ever did see in all my life.  His single blinder was swingin’ loose under his neck.  His eyes was right mean and white, and the Mexican saints only knows which way he was a-lookin’.

“So there we was,” went on Curly, with another sigh, “all Socorro sayin’ bright and cheerful things to the Bar T, and us plumb broke, and far, far from home.

“We roped Pinto, and led him home behind the wagon, forty miles over the sand, by the soft, silver light of the moon.  There wasn’t a horse or saddle left in our rodeo, and we had to ride on the grub wagon, which you know is a disgrace to any gentleman that wears spurs.  Pinto, he was the gayest one in the lot.  I reckon he allowed he’d been Queen of the May.  Every time he saw a jack rabbit or a bunch of sage brush, he’d snort and take a pasear sideways as far as the rope would let him go.

“‘The patient seems to be still laborin’ under great cerebral excitation,’ says the Doc, which was likewise on the wagon.  ’I ought to have had a year on him,’ says he, despondent like.

“‘Shut up,’ says Tom Redmond to the Doc.  ’I’d shoot up your own osshus structure plenty,’ says he, ‘if I hadn’t bet my gun on that horse race.’

“Well, we got home, the wagon-load of us, in the mornin’ sometime, every one of us ashamed to look the cook in the face, and hopin’ the boss was away from home.  But he wasn’t.  He looks at us, and says he;—­