The days that followed was mighty peaceful to the big buckskin, and Smoky seemed some contented too, he was gradually getting used to being away from his mother and new young fillies and colts he was running with made it all a heap easier to forget. Then again, the knocks he’d got ever since that day when things had been so peaceful with his mammy, when he just figgered he’d have to start something to bust up the monotony of that peace, all took the mischief out of him. The fight with the black stallion, the lonesome ramblings with the buckskin, and the other fights with the chestnut stud all helped eddicate him and shape him into a full sized, serious thinking gelding. It didn’t take so much to keep him contented no more, and somehow or other he was seeing a heap more in life.
That’s the way things stood with Smoky that summer; him and the buckskin ranged high up in the mountains with the little bunch of mares and colts, they all snoozed and grazed thru the days and done the same thru the nights. A little play was brought on once in a while by some of the young colts and Smoky and the buckskin was always the steady victims of them. Them two older horses was colts themselves at them times and the way they’d all nip one another and then sashay around hell bent for election, a human would wonder at the care Smoky and the buckskin was taking so that the colts would feel winners in all they’d start.
Summer passed, the grass had gradually turned to a yellow brown and the leaves of the aspens begin banking up on the edges of the streams; fall had come, and one day the bunch started a grazing steady lower and lower till a few days later the foothills was reached. It was there that Smoky took the lead and headed for the winter range where his mammy had put him thru that first year. The big buckskin followed till, glancing back over his withers he noticed that the mares and colts had left off and branched out another direction. The buckskin stood in his tracks, watched Smoky line out straight ahead, and then looked back at the mares again. For the time being he wasn’t sure whether to go on with his pardner or turn back to the bunch. It was hard for him to decide, he wanted to go with Smoky and still them little colts sure had a mighty holt on his heartstrings. It was just about as he was doing the hardest figgering when one of them little fellers came out of the bunch a ways and nickered for him. That little nicker decided things for the buckskin, he answered it and loped back to join with the other little fellers and the mares.
Smoky went on straight ahead. Maybe he was thinking strong, thinking that he’d see his mammy again on that winter range. Anyway, it never come to him to look back and see if the bunch was following him, and finally when it did come to him that he was drifting on alone, he stopped and looked around in a sort of vacant stare, his instinct had been controlling him and was taking him back to his home range. But when he found himself alone that way it all left him surprised at first and then doubtful as to what to do. He was mighty attached to that buckskin, the little colts, and the bunch in general.
He looked at the far away hills of his range and he seemed like to think on the subject for quite a spell, then of a sudden his head went up, a loud nicker went out and away in the distance he could hear an answer—the answer had come from his pardner, the buckskin.
Smoky nickered again and loped back to the bunch. He’d come to feel that it didn’t matter so much which range he wintered on, he was a big horse now, and a few ridges to the north or south of that range he was raised in didn’t make much difference.—An old mare had took the lead and from then on Smoky just followed side by side with the buckskin. A little colt nipped him in the flanks, and all was well.
IV
The End of a Rope
Snow layed heavy on the range that winter, grass was hard to get at, and the little bunch of ponies that tracked the low hills which raised up on the prairies was finding themselves doing a lot of rustling and pawing, and getting very little feed. Bunches of cattle followed ’em wherever they went and rooted with their nose for the few blades of dry grass them horses had pawed the snow off of and left.
Hay couldn’t be bought that winter and the stockmen found themselves where they had to take a chance and pull their cattle thru with whatever little hay the dry summer before could let ’em have. Cattle had been in fine shape that fall, but as the snow kept a piling and a drifting and covering up the feed the tallow kept a dwindling away from under the critters’ hides and lean ribs begin to show more and more thru the long winter hair.
Then came a time as the blizzards blowed and regardless of what all the stockmen done (which was to the limit of what any human can do) when mounds of white begin to show here and there in that part of the range. Underneath them white mounds was the dead carcass of a critter. Some was dug up by the varmints, cayotes was licking
