t?" 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.

"Thumb him! Thumb him!" the audience cried, referring to the cowboy
trick of running the thumbs along a certain place in the shoulder to
stir the anger of the bucker.

But the rider slipped off with disgust. "Give me another horse," he
demanded, and after a minute's consultation among the judges a second
pony was driven out from the corral. This one proved to be a Tartar. It
went off in a frenzy of pitching the moment its rider dropped into the
saddle.

"Y'u'll go a long way before you see better ridin' than his and Mac's.
Notice how he gives to its pitching," said Bannister, as he watched his
cousin's perfect ease in the cyclone of which he was the center.

"I expect it depends on the kind of a 'hawss,'" she mocked. "He's riding
well, isn't he?"

"I don't know any that ride better."

The horse put up a superb fight, trying everything it knew to unseat
this demon clamped to its back. It possessed in combination all the
worst vices, was a weaver, a sunfisher and a fence-rower, and never
had it tried so desperately to maintain its record of never having
been ridden. But the outlaw in the saddle was too much for the outlaw
underneath. He was master, just as he was first among the ruffians whom
he led, because there was in him a red-hot devil of wickedness that
would brook no rival.

The furious bronco surrendered without an instant's warning, and its
rider slipped at once to the ground. As he sauntered through the dust
toward the grand stand, Helen could not fail to see how his vanity
sunned itself in the applause that met his performance. His equipment
was perfect to the least detail. The reflection from a lady's
looking-glass was no brighter than the silver spurs he jingled on his
sprightly heels. Strikingly handsome in a dark, sinister way, one would
say at first sight,