"Jim McWilliams will ride Dead Easy," came the announcement through the megaphone, and a burst of cheering passed along the grand stand, for the sunny smile of the foreman of the Lazy D made him a general favorite.Helen leaned forward and whispered something gaily to Nora, who sat in the seat in front of her.The Irish girl laughed and blushed, but when her mistress looked up it was her turn to feel the mounting color creep into her cheeks.For Ned Bannister, arrayed in all his riding finery, was making his way along the aisle to her.
She had not seen him since he had ridden away from the Lazy D ten days before, quite sufficiently recovered from his wounds to take up the routine of life again.They had parted not the best of friends, for she had not yet forgiven him for his determination to leave with his cousin on the night that she had been forced to insist on his remaining.He had put her ina false position, and he had never explained to her why.Nor could she guess the reason--for he was not a man to harvest credit for himself by explaining his own chivalry.
Since her heart told her how glad she was he had come to her box to see her, she greeted him with the coolest little nod in the world.
"Good morning, Miss Messiter.May I sit beside y'u?" he asked.
"Oh, certainly!" She swept her skirts aside carelessly and made room for him."I thought you were going to ride soon.""No, I ride last except for Sanford, the champion.My cousin rides just before me.He's entered under the name of Jack Holloway."She was thinking that he had no business to be riding, that his wounds were still too fresh, but she did not intend again to show interest enough in his affairs to interfere even by suggestion.Her heart had been in her mouth every moment of the time this morning while he had been tossed hither and thither on the back of his mount.In his delirium he had said he loved her.If he did, why should he torture her so? It was well enough for sound men to risk their lives, but--A cheer swelled in the grand stand and died breathlessly away.McWilliams was setting a pace it would take a rare expert to equal.He was a trick rider, and all the spectacular feats that appealed to the onlooker were his.While his horse was wildly pitching, he drank a bottle of pop and tossed the bottle away.With the reins in his teeth he slipped off his coat and vest, and concluded a splendid exhibition of skill by riding with his feet out of the stirrups.He had been smoking a cigar when he mounted.Except while he had been drinking the pop it had been in his mouth from beginning to end, and, after he had vaulted from the pony's back, he deliberately puffed a long smoke-spiral into the air, to show that his cigar was still alight.No previous rider had earned so spontaneous a burst of applause."He's ce'tainly a pure when it comes to riding," acknowledged Bannister."I look to see him get either first or second.""Whom do you think is his most dangerous rival?" Helen asked.
"My cousin is a straight-up rider, too.He's more graceful than Mac, I think, but not quite so good on tricks.It will be nip and tuck.""How about your cousin's cousin?" she asked, with bold irony.
"He hopes he won't have to take the dust," was his laughing answer.
The next rider suffered defeat irrevocably before he had been thirty seconds in the saddle.His mount was one of the most cunning of the outlaw ponies of the Northwest, and it brought him to grief by jamming his leg hard against the fence.He tried in vain to spur the bronco into the middle of the arena, but after it drove at a post for the third time and ground his limb against it, he gave up to the pain and slipped off.
"That isn't fair, is it?" Helen asked of the young man sitting beside her.
He shrugged his lean, broad shoulders."He should have known how to keep the horse in the open.Mac would never have been caught that way.""Jack Holloway on Rocking Horse," the announcer shouted.
It took four men and two lariats to subdue this horse to a condition sufficiently tame to permit of a saddle being slipped on.Even then this could not be accomplished without throwing the bronco first.The result was that all the spirit was taken out of the animal by the preliminary ordeal, so that when the man from the Shoshone country mounted, his steed was too jaded to attempt resistance.
"Thumb him! Thumb him!" the audience cried, referring to the cowboy trick of running the thumbs along a certain place in the shoulder to stir the anger of the bucker.
But the rider slipped off with disgust."Give me another horse," he demanded, and after a minute's consultation among the judges a second pony was driven out from the corral.This one proved to be a Tartar.It went off in a frenzy of pitching the moment its rider dropped into the saddle.
"Y'u'll go a long way before you see better ridin' than his and Mac's.Notice how he gives to its pitching," said Bannister, as he watched his cousin's perfect ease in the cyclone of which he was the center.
"I expect it depends on the kind of a 'hawss,'" she mocked."He's riding well, isn't he?""I don't know any that ride better."
The horse put up a superb fight, trying everything it knew to unseat this demon clamped to its back.It possessed in combination all the worst vices, was a weaver, a sunfisher and a fence-rower, and never had it triedso desperately to maintain its record of never having been ridden.But the outlaw in the saddle was too much for the outlaw underneath.He was master, just as he was first among the ruffians whom he led, because there was in him a red-hot devil of wickedness that would brook no rival.
