ile--Jose, he stands up in his
stirrups and pulls off his hat, and just whangs old Pinto over the head
with it, friendly like, to show him there ain't no coldness.

"We never did rightly know what happened at that time. The Greaser
admits he may have busted off the fastenin' of that single blinder down
Pinto's nose. Anyhow, Pinto runs a few short jumps, and then stops,
lookin' troubled. The next minute he hides his face on the Greaser and
there is a glimpse of bright, glad sunlight on the bottom of Jose's
moccasins. Next minute after that Pinto is up in the grandstand among
the ladies, and there he sits down in the lap of the Governor's wife,
which was among them present.

"There was time, even then, to lead him down and over the line, but
before we could think of that he falls to buckin' sincere and
conscientious, up there among the benches, and if he didn't jar his
osshus structure a heap _then_, it wasn't no fault of his'n. We all
run up in front of the grandstand, and stood lookin' up at Pinto, and
him the maddest, scaredest, cross-eyedest horse I ever did see in all
my life. His single blinder was swingin' loose under his neck. His
eyes was right mean and white, and the Mexican saints only knows which
way he _was_ a-lookin'.

"So there we was," went on Curly, with another sigh, "all Socorro
sayin' bright and cheerful things to the Bar T, and us plumb broke, and
far, far from home.

"We roped Pinto, and led him home behind the wagon, forty miles over
the sand, by the soft, silver light of the moon. There wasn't a horse
or saddle left in our _rodeo_, and we had to ride on the grub wagon,
which you know is a disgrace to any gentleman that wears spurs. Pinto,
he was the gayest one in the lot. I reckon he allowed he'd been Queen
of the May. Every time he saw a jack rabbit or a bunch of sage brush,
he'd snort and take a _pasear_ sideways as far as the rope would let
him go.

"'The patient seems to be still laborin' under great cerebral
excitation,' says the Doc, which was likewise on the wagon. 'I ought
to have had a year on him,' says he, despondent like.

"'Shut up,' says Tom Redmond to the Doc. 'I'd shoot up your own osshus
structure plenty,' says he, 'if I hadn't bet my gun on that horse race.'

"Well, we got home, the wagon-load of us, in the mornin' sometime,
every one of us ashamed to look the cook in the face, and hopin' the
boss was away from home. But he wasn't. He looks at us, and says h