The cowboy had no more than reached the top pole of the corral when a sudden commotion, which sounded like a landslide, made him turn. Smoky had come up, and at last given a chance had more than started to make use of it. It was his turn to do some pounding, and he done it with the saddle that was on his back and which went with every crooked and hard hitting jump he made.
The breed had rode many hard horses and he was a good rider, but he soon found that Smoky was a harder horse to set than any he’d ever rode before; and as good a rider as he was there was many a twist brought in that he couldn’t keep track of. They kept a coming too fast, and it wasn’t long when he begin to feel that setting in that saddle on such a horse was no place for him. The saddle horn and cantle was taking turns and hitting him from all sides, till he didn’t know which way he was setting. Pretty soon he lost both stirrups, and once as he was a hanging over to one side, one of them stirrups came up and hit him between the eyes. That finished him; he hit the ground like a ton of lead.
The cowboy up on top of the corral had laughed and enjoyed the performance all the way thru; and when the breed dug his nose in the dust of the corral he laughed all the more. He’d never been more agreeable to seeing a man get “busted” in his life.
The breed layed in a heap, never moving; and then the cowboy, finally getting serious, was for getting him out of there before the horse spotted him, and reduced him into thin air. Somehow, he wasn’t caring to see a human get tore apart and right before his eyes that way even if that human did deserve killing; but Smoky’s interest was all for shedding the saddle right then and all that carried the breed’s smell; finally it begin to slip;—higher and higher on his withers it went till the high point was reached, and then it started going down. When it reached the ground the hackamore had come off with it, and before Smoky, slick and clean, straightened up again, the breed had picked himself up, and without the help of the cowboy, sneaked out of the corral.
The next few minutes was used by that cowboy in telling the breed to get another horse saddled and hit the trail while the hitting was good, and helping him getting his horses together, boosted him out of camp.—But the breed wasn’t thru with Smoky, he was going to “tend to him” again some other time.
Months had went by before that other time come, and it’d been away late in the next fall before that hombre ever put his hands on Smoky again. In that time the other ponies, which all had seemed inclined to behave, had been sold. Smoky had been kept in the corral, treated with a club regular, and fed “post hay,” till, as the breed figgered, he’d break that pony’s spirit, or break his neck; but he was going to make him behave some way, so as he’d get the price he’d be asking for him.
Then one night a high March wind had sprung up, rattled the corral gate, and finally worked it open. Smoky hadn’t been long in seeing the opening, and when a few days later the breed, hunting for the horse, spotted him, the mouse colored gelding had took up with the wild bunch, and only a glimpse of him did he get.
Every once in a while that whole summer the breed had tried cutting Smoky out of the wild bunch and run him in, but that pony had been harder to get near than any of the wild ones he was with. He knowed what was on the program for him if that breed ever caught him again. The steady beatings he’d got from him had made his hate grow for the human till a striking rattlesnake looked like a friend in comparing.
But the breed hadn’t been for quitting—he couldn’t stand to have anything get the best of him, not even an ornery pony; and as Smoky enjoyed his wild freedom them summer months, the breed had kept a studying which circle Smoky and the wild ones would take whenever they was being chased, and getting a good lay of the land he finally figgered a plan.
And, that’s how come, when he started out after Smoky again in the fall he knowed just where to place a relay string of ponies. At the other end was a trap corral and well hid. Then the breed spotted the horse late one afternoon, and fell in behind him and the other wild ones he was with. It had been a long chase; the wild ones had dropped out of the run one by one and branched to one side, but Smoky and the rest of the strongest had kept on right along on the trail where the breed had stationed his fresh relay horses. Finally, and as the breed kept a coming in on ’em with fresh horses, the strongest of the mustangs kept a branching out; but Smoky had kept on straight ahead, till, leg weary and staggering, he’d found himself in the wings of the trap corral, and then inside, past being able to see the grinning halfbreed who’d closed the gate on him.
A few days went by when Smoky seemed in a trance. He remembered some of being led and jerked all the way back to the breed’s hangout, of being saddled the next day and jerked around
