feet wide apart, small head low, and red eyes
gleaming wickedly. Deep-chested, with mighty shoulders, barrel-bodied
like an Indian pony, Teddy showed power in every line of him. It was
easy to guess him for the unbroken outlaw he was.

There was a swift scatter backward of the onlookers as Pedro swung to
the saddle. Before his right foot was in the stirrup, the bronco bucked.

The young Mexican, light and graceful, settled to the saddle with a
delighted laugh, and drove the spurs home. The animal humped like a
camel, head and tail down, went into the air and back to earth, with
four feet set like pile-drivers. It was a shock to drive a man's spine
together like a concertina; but Pedro took it limply, giving to the jar
of the impact as the pony came down again and again.

Teddy tasted the quirt along his quarters, and the pain made him
frantic. He went screaming straight into the air, hung there a long
instant, and fell over backward. The lad was out of the saddle in time
and no more, and back in his seat before the outlaw had scrambled to his
feet.

The spur starred him to renewed life. Like a flash of lightning, the
brute's head swung round and snapped at the boy's leg. Pedro wrenched
the head back in time to save himself; and Teddy went to sun-fishing,
and presently to fence-rowing.

The dust flew in clouds. It wrapped them in so that the boy saw nothing
but the wicked ears in front of him. His throat became a lime-kiln, his
eyes stared like those of a man weary from long wakefulness. The hot sun
baked his bare neck and head, the while Teddy rocketed into the sky and
pounded into the earth.

Neither rider nor mount had mercy. The quirt went back and forth like a
piston-rod, and the outlaw, in screaming fury, leaped and tossed like a
small boat in a tremendous sea of cross-currents.

"It's sure hell-for-leather. That hawss can tie himself in more knots
than any that was ever foaled," commented a tobacco-chewing puncher in a
scarlet kerchief.

"Pedro is a straight-up rider, but he ain't got it in him to master
Teddy--no; nor no man ain't," contributed Yeager again proudly. "Hawsses
is like men. Some of 'em can't be broke; you can only kill them. Teddy's
one of them kind."

Dick differed, but did not say so.

"Look at him now. There he goes weaving. That hawss is a devil, I tell
you. He's got every hawss-trick there is, and all of 'em worked up to a
combination of his own. Look out there, Ped."

The warning