Santa Fe trail. Although he
stood but thirteen hands and tipped the beam at scarcely twelve hundred
weight, you might have guessed him to be taller by two hands. The
deception lay in the way he carried his shapely head and in the manner
in which his arched neck tapered from the well-placed shoulders.

A horseman would have said that he had a "perfect barrel," meaning that
his ribs were well rounded. His very gait was an embodied essay on
graceful pride. As for his coat, save for a white star just in the
middle of his forehead, it was as black and sleek as the nap on a new
silk hat. After a good rubbing he was so shiny that at a distance you
might have thought him starched and ironed and newly come from the
laundry.

His arrival at Bar L Ranch made no great stir, however. They were not
connoisseurs of good blood and sleek coats at the Bar L outfit. They
were busy folks who most needed tough animals that could lope off fifty
miles at a stretch. They wanted horses whose education included the fine
art of knowing when to settle back on the rope and dig in toes. It was
not a question as to how fast you could do your seven furlongs. It was
more important to know if you could make yourself useful at a round-up.

"'Nother bunch o' them green Eastern horses," grumbled the ranch boss as
the lot was turned into a corral. "But that black fellow'd make a
rustler's mouth water, eh, Lefty?" In answer to which the said Lefty,
being a man little given to speech, grunted.

"We'll brand 'em in the mornin'," added the ranch boss.

Now most steers and all horses object to the branding process. Even the
spiritless little Indian ponies, accustomed to many ingenious kinds of
abuse, rebel at this. A meek-eyed mule, on whom humility rests as an
all-covering robe, must be properly roped before submitting.

In branding they first get a rope over your neck and shut off your wind.
Then they trip your feet by roping your forelegs while you are on the
jump. This brings you down hard and with much abruptness. A cowboy sits
on your head while others pin you to the ground from various
vantage-points. Next someone holds a red-hot iron on your rump until it
has sunk deep into your skin. That is branding.

Well, this thing they did to the black thoroughbred, who had up to that
time felt not so much as the touch of a whip. They did it, but not
before a full dozen cow-punchers had worked themselves into such a fury
of exasperation that no shred of pic