Clint, turned to his friend and grinning at his idea of changing the subject that way, finally answered: “I guess it’s because Old Tom feels the end a coming, besides he’s getting crowded all around by small outfits, and his range ain’t holding up like it used to.”
“But what are you going to do when the Rocking R sells out? You left that country quite a few times the last few years, and I notice you always go back like there was no other that suited you.”
“I’ve got that fixed,” says Clint, gradually taking more heart in the new subject, and there he tried to describe some; “You know about where that camp is where I used to break horses when I first started working for the Rocking R? It’s where the outfit used to run their stock horses. Well, I bought that camp from Old Tom Jarvis—that is, I talked him into selling it to me, and four thousand acres of the fine range around to go with it.
“I’m thinking that this shipment I’m getting together now will be the last Old Tom’ll ever buy, and by the time I get this trainload of Sonora Reds north and delivered to him, I’ll have enough money to make the final payment on my place and still have enough left to buy a few head of cattle and start stocking it.”
Clint often thought of his little place up in the heart of the cow country to the north. He could picture his own cattle ranging there and packing a brand of his own on their slick hides. He’d a long time hoped for the likes, and at last he was getting it. A couple more days now, and he’d be heading north again, and there to stay, this time.
The last day of the rodeo had come, and Clint was to start with his trainload of stock that night. Him and his friend was setting in the lobby of the hotel that evening a talking and wondering when they’d be seeing one another again, when outside and by the telegraph pole, came the same old mouse colored horse and stopped not an inch from where the two men had seen him a couple of days before.
Both was quick to spot him again this time, and right then, for some reason or other, the conversation died down. The first sight of that old pony hadn’t been forgot, and when he showed up this second time, right before their eyes, he was like reminding ’em, and natural like, set the two men to thinking. That old shadow of a horse told some of the hard knocks of life, of things that was past and gone and which could of been bettered while the bettering could be done.
It was while the thinking was going on that way, that Clint sort of felt a faint, far away something a knocking and from down the bottom of his think tank. That something was trying hard to come back to life as that man’s eyes kept a going over the pony’s blazed face and bony frame, but it was buried so far underneath so many things that’d been stacked there that the knocking was pretty well muffled up. It’d have to be helped by some sort of a sudden jolt before it could come out on top.
The jolt came as the vegetable man got his seat on the wagon and as usual reached for the whip. Clint’s friend a trying to keep him from running out and starting a rompus had tried to draw his interest by asking:
“What’s become of that cowhorse Smoky, that used to—?”
But the question was left for him to wonder about, for Clint wasn’t there to answer. Instead the hotel door slammed and only a glimpse of that same cowboy could be seen as he passed by the lobby window. In less than it takes to tell it, he was up on the wagon, took a bulldogging holt of the surprised vegetable man, and by his whiskers, drug him off his seat and down to earth.
The telephone on the desk of the sheriff’s office rang till it near danced a jig, and when that feller lifted the receiver, a female voice was heard to holler: “Somebody is killing somebody else with a whip, by the Casa Grande Hotel. Hurry! Quick!”
The sheriff appeared on the scene and took in the goings on at a glance. Like a man who knowed his business, his eyes went to looking for what might of caused the argument as he came. He looked at the old horse whose frame showed thru the hide, then the whip marks on that hide. He knowed horses as well as he did men; and when he noticed more marks of the same whip on the bewhiskered man’s face, he stood his ground, watched, and then grinned.
“Say, cowboy,” he finally says, “don’t scatter that hombre’s remains too much; you know we got to keep record of that kind the same as if it was a white man, and I don’t want to be looking all over the streets to find out who he was.”
Clint turned at the sound of the voice, and sizing up the grinning sheriff, went back to his victim and broke the butt end of the whip over his head; after which he wiped his hands, and proceeded to unhook the old horse off the wagon.
That evening was spent in “investigating.” Clint and the sheriff went to the chicken horse man and found out enough from him about the vegetable man and his way of treating horses to put that hombre in a cool place and keep him there for a spell.
“I’m glad to’ve caught on to that feller’s doings,” remarks the
