They’ll keep the ponies fat and feeling good, and some of them horses find it hard to behave and will try to jar loose the eye teeth of their riders. The cowboy wants ’em that way though—it’s a pride of his to have a kinky horse under him that’s feeling good rather than some gentle old plug that’s leg weary. That all gets him in time, but there’s a grin on his face when that time comes, a grin from the pride of knowing that he never was seen on no horse that was against the principle of a cowboy to ride.
Like with Clint, horses was the life of him. He loved ’em for all he was worth and the greatest pleasure in the world for him was in just being with a corral full of ’em, handling ’em and feeling of their hides. The satisfaction he’d get out of seeing some four year old colt learn the things he’d teach meant a heap more to him than the wages he drawed for that work; and there was times as he’d be breaking some right brainy gelding and watch the horse pick up fast on the eddication he’d give him, when he’d feel real attached to the pony. He’d hate to give him up when the time came for all half broke horses to be turned over to the roundup wagons and where more teaching in the handling of the critter begin.
“I feel sort of married to them kind of ponies” he’d say, “and I sure don’t hanker to part with ’em just when we’re beginning to get along good together, but” he’d go on “I guess as long as I’ll be breaking horses this way I can’t get too sensitive.”
But Clint kept a being sensitive that way, and he never was happy when he’d see riders coming in on him and then ride away hazing a bunch of the broncs he’d “started.” “Some day,” he was heard to say once “I’m going to meet a horse I’ll really get married to, and then there’ll be things a popping.”
Clint would have such a liking for some of them ponies that he’d forget and didn’t want to think that they belonged to the company and not to him. He was just hired to break ’em. He’d reason that out often but that reasoning never fazed the hankering he felt and that’s how come when he run in the mouse colored gelding he begin to do some tall figgering.
He had a hunch when he first set eyes on that pony that he’d met the horse which would start “things a popping” when any rider showed up to claim all that’s half broke. Clint had dreamed of such a horse as the mouse colored gelding but he’d never expected to see one really living, that pony had got holt of his heart strings from the start, and as he watched thru the bars of the corral out to where the horse was picketed he felt him to be the kind he’d steal if he couldn’t buy, and if he could neither steal nor buy he’d work for.
It’d been two days since he’d run him in and put him on the picket rope outside the corral a ways, and in them two days Clint had been mighty fearful lest somebody rode up on him, seen the horse and took possession of him as private saddle stock for the superintendent or some other what owned shares in the outfit and liked pretty horses that way. Clint wanted that horse mighty bad and he was just leery something would happen so he’d be took away from him, but as he’d reason some he was less worried and he’d wind up by saying as he’d take another peek towards the gelding. “They’d have to let me break him first, and before anybody else gets him I’ll sure make an outlaw out of that horse.”
That was no way for Clint to feel maybe, but that’s sure enough the way he figgered on doing rather than lose the horse to anybody else;—that feeling was past skin deep with him and that I think excuses him some.
In the two days that Clint’d had the horse up, there was no chance passed where he could show his feelings and win that pony’s confidence—if the picket rope tangled him up too much Clint was right there to untangle him and each time the gelding fought less when he came. That pony was gradually losing his fear of being et up or tore apart by the human and pretty soon he felt as Clint came and went that each visit from that crethure brought some comfort in a way.
It was on the second evening and when the day’s work was all done that Clint made his way from the bunk house to where the gelding was picketed. He went up to within a rope’s length of the horse, rolled a smoke, and stood there watching him.
“Smoky,” he says, “you’re some horse”—Clint hadn’t hardly realized he’d spoke a name, he was too busy watching and admiring that pony’s every move, so as it was that name came unconscious like to the cowboy, and it was used and repeated from then on as natural as though that name had been thought and decided on.
He’d named many horses and had always let the name come to him either by the color, size, or shape of each horse, and sometimes by the way they acted. He’d called one tall rangy horse “Shorty” and another low built small horse “Skyhigh.” Often the name didn’t at all fit the horse in that way but there was some reason there, the same as there was a mighty good reason to call the mouse colored gelding “Smoky.”
He did look like a rounded shiny cloud of
