emedy his ocular
defecks, too,' says he. He allows that if we will give him time, he
can make Pinto's eyes straighten out so's he'll look like a new rockin'
horse Christmas mornin' at a church festerval. Incidentally he
suggests that we get a tall leather blinder and run it down Pinto's
nose, right between his eyes.

"This last was what caught us most of all. 'This here blinder idea,'
says Tom Redmond, 'is plumb scientific. The trouble with us cow
punchers is we ain't got no brains--or we wouldn't be cow punchers!
Now look here, Pinto's right eye looks off to the left, and his left
eye looks off to the right. Like enough he sees all sorts of things on
both sides of him, and gets 'em mixed. Now, you put this here harness
leather between his eyes, and his right eye looks plumb into it on one
side, and his left eye looks into it on the other. Result is, he can't
see nothing at _all_! Now, if he'll only run when he's _blind_, why,
we can skin them Socorro people till it seems like a shame.'

"Well, right then we all felt money in our pockets. We seemed most too
good to be out ridin' sign, or pullin' old cows out of mudholes. 'You
leave all that to me,' says Doc. 'By the time I've worked on this
patient's nerve centres for a while, I'll make a new horse out of him.
You watch me,' says he. That made us all feel cheerful. We thought
this wasn't such a bad world, after all.

"We passed the hat in the interest of modern science, and we fenced off
a place in the corral and set up a school of ostypathy in our midst.
Doc, he done some things that seemed to us right strange at first. He
gets Pinto up in one corner and takes him by the ear, and tries to
break his neck, with his foot in the middle of his back. Then he goes
around on the other side and does the same thing. He hammers him up
one side and down the other, and works him and wiggles him till us cow
punchers thought he was goin' to scatter him around worse than
Cassybianca on the burnin' deck after the exploshun. My experience,
though, is that it's right hard to shake a horse to pieces. Pinto, he
stood it all right. And say, he got so gentle, with that tall blinder
between his eyes, that he'd 'a' followed off a sheepherder.

"All this time we was throwin' oats a-plenty into Pinto, rubbin' his
legs down, and gettin' him used to a saddle a little bit lighter than a
regular cow saddle. Doc, he allows he can see his eyes straightenin'
out every day. 'I o