The Pistoleer by James Carlos Blake Read Free Book Online

shake a branding iron at. Most of them were mavericks, but lots of them were just strays—cows that once upon a time belonged to ranchers who went off to fight the Yankees and either never came back or came back long after their ranches had gone to hell and their herds had scattered all over the countryside. It was only a matter of time before some of them strays started getting rounded up by fellas who couldn’t stand the temptation of seeing so many of them running around loose. Besides, it didn’t take a whole lot of artwork with a branding iron to change a brand. I ain’t saying we ever did that sort of thing at my camp, mind you—only that you couldn’t help but hear of it being done here and there and yonder, every now and then, by somebody or other.
    Anyhow, Wes already knew a good bit about roping by the time he came to work for me. He had real quick fingers, which you have to have to be any good with a lariat. You got to be able to size the loop—make it bigger or smaller—with just your throwing hand, while your other hand’s paying out rope and working the reins. And you got to be able to do this while you’re riding at full gallop. You got to be able to do it as natural as you spit and breathe. You watch a roper’s hands real close sometime when he’s working and you’ll see just how fast and smooth his fingers move. Quick and sure as a banjo picker’s.
    After his first few days at the camp, he was roping longhorns like he’d been doing it all his life. Big Len showed him how to lasso a calf with a heel catch so you could drag it behind your horse right up to the fire to get cut and branded. Joe O showed him how two riders could team up to bring down a big steer with what we call a head-and-heel catch, and inside a week he was even making over-and-under catches, which some cowhands never get the hang of even after years of trying.
    Wes learned everything real good and real quick. I showed him how to cut the balls off a calf as slick as peeling a potato and how to heat an iron just right so it leaves a good clear brand but doesn’t burn too deep and set the hide on fire. I taught him the proper way to saw a pair of horns, which you sometimes had to do to cows with horns so long they couldn’t help but stab other cows when they got bunched up tight. I showed him how to use an ax for the job when the horns were too hard for the saw. There wasn’t anything about cattle that boy didn’t want to know. He even had me show him how to doctor a cow for screwworms and lumpy jaw and other such troubles. He said he figured to have his own herds someday and ought to know how to take care of them. He had a head on his shoulders.
    I t wasn’t all work, of course. Every now and then we’d go into town to see a horse race and wet our snouts and try our luck at the card tables. If there’s a man alive who don’t like horse racing I never met him. To see a couple of fast horses come galloping hard between two long lines of spectators all jumping up and down and yelling their lungs out as the horses go rumbling past, kicking up clods of dirt, huffing and big-eyed and showing their teeth, the big muscles stretched in their necks and their riders hunched down low and whipping at them with the reins and shouting in their ear—well, hell, if that don’t make your heart hop faster I’d say you were ready for burial. It’s something about a horse race that gets my blood jumping long before the animals even get to the starting line. Wes was the same way. He was always talking about buying himself a racer someday soon.
    He’d surely be able to afford one, the way he raked in the winnings at the gaming tables. That boy was the luckiest gambler I ever saw. And I don’t mean at just one particular kind of game. He won at everything —poker, dice, faro, chuckaluck, seven-up, you name it. If the house offered it, he played it—and he’d win at it a good deal more than he’d lose. I’ve always been a fair hand at