for the night. Tresler did the same for his mare. Then
they came out together. At the door Joe paused.

"Say," he remarked simply, "I jest didn't know you wus that smart."

"Don't credit me with smartness. It's--poor little girl."

"Ah!" Joe's face twisted into his apish grin. "Say, you'll stick to
what you said?"

"Every word of it."

"Good; the rest's doin' itself, sure."

And they went their several ways; Joe to the kitchen of the house, and
Tresler to his dusty mattress in the bunkhouse.

CHAPTER IX

TRESLER INVOLVES HIMSELF FURTHER;
THE LADY JEZEBEL IN A FREAKISH MOOD

Enthusiasm is the mainspring of a cowboy's life. Without enthusiasm a
cowboy inevitably falls to the inglorious level of a "hired man"; a
nice distinction in the social conditions of frontier life. The cowboy
is sometimes a good man--not meaning a man of religion--and often a
bad man. He is rarely indifferent. There are no half measures with
him. His pride is in his craft. He will lavish the tenderness of a
mother for her child upon his horse; he will play poker till he has
had the doubtful satisfaction of seeing his last cent pass into
somebody else's pocket; he will drink on the most generous scale, and
is ever ready to quarrel. Even in this last he believes in
thoroughness. But he has many good points which often outweigh his
baser instincts. They can be left to the imagination; for it is best
to know the worst of him at the outset to get a proper, and not a
glorified estimate of his true character. The object of this story is
to give a veracious, and not a highly gilded picture of the hardy
prairie man of days gone by.

Before all things the cowboy is a horseman. His pride in this almost
amounts to a craze. His fastidiousness in horse-flesh, in his
accoutrements, his boots, his chapps, his jaunty silk handkerchief
about his neck, even to the gauntlets he so often wears upon his
hands, is an education in dandyism. He is a thorough dandy in his
outfit. And the greater the dandy, the more surely is he a capable
horseman. He is not a horse-breaker by trade, but he loves
"broncho-busting" as a boy loves his recreation. It comes to him as a
relief from the tedium of branding, feeding, rounding up, cutting out,
mending fences, and all the utility work of the ranch. Every unbroken
colt is like a ticket in a lottery; it may be easy, or it may be a
tartar. And the tartar is the prize that every cowpuncher wants to
draw so that he may