not easy to ride.  The effort both to ride them and to look as if I enjoyed doing so, on some cool morning when my grinning cowboy friends had gathered round “to see whether the high-headed bay could buck the boss off,” doubtless was of benefit to me, but lacked much of being enjoyable.  The time I smashed my rib I was bucked off on a stone.  The time I hurt the point of my shoulder I was riding a big, sulky horse named Ben Butler, which went over backwards with me.  When we got up it still refused to go anywhere; so, while I sat it, Sylvane Ferris and George Meyer got their ropes on its neck and dragged it a few hundred yards, choking but stubborn, all four feet firmly planted and plowing the ground.  When they released the ropes it lay down and wouldn’t get up.  The round-up had started; so Sylvane gave me his horse, Baldy, which sometimes bucked but never went over backwards, and he got on the now rearisen Ben Butler.  To my discomfiture Ben started quietly beside us, while Sylvane remarked, “Why, there’s nothing the matter with this horse; he’s a plumb gentle horse.”  Then Ben fell slightly behind and I heard Sylvane again, “That’s all right!  Come along!  Here, you!  Go on, you!  Hi, hi, fellows, help me out! he’s lying on me!” Sure enough, he was; and when we dragged Sylvane from under him the first thing the rescued Sylvane did was to execute a war-dance, spurs and all, on the iniquitous Ben.  We could do nothing with him that day; subsequently we got him so that we could ride him; but he never became a nice saddle-horse.

As with all other forms of work, so on the round-up, a man of ordinary power, who nevertheless does not shirk things merely because they are disagreeable or irksome, soon earns his place.  There were crack riders and ropers who, just because they felt such overweening pride in their own prowess, were not really very valuable men.  Continually on the circles a cow or a calf would get into some thick patch of bulberry bush and refuse to come out; or when it was getting late we would pass some bad lands that would probably not contain cattle, but might; or a steer would turn fighting mad, or a calf grow tired and want to lie down.  If in such a case the man steadily persists in doing the unattractive thing, and after two hours of exasperation and harassment does finally get the cow out, and keep her out, of the bulberry bushes, and drives her to the wagon, or finds some animals that have been passed by in the fourth or fifth patch of bad lands he hunts through, or gets the calf up on his saddle and takes it in anyhow, the foreman soon grows to treat him as having his uses and as being an asset of worth in the round-up, even though neither a fancy roper nor a fancy rider.