THE ROUND-UP 



59 



shadows. Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough ; 

 at any rate, not when he first feels the horse move under him. 



Sometimes we trot or pace, and again we lope or gallop ; the few 

 who are to take the outside circle must needs ride both hard and fast. 

 Although only grass-fed, the horses are tough and wiry ; and, moreover, 

 are each used but once in four days, or thereabouts, so they stand the 

 work well. The course out lies across great grassy plateaus, along knife- 

 like ridge crests, among winding valleys and ravines, and over acres of 

 barren, sun-scorched buttes, that look grimly grotesque and forbidding, 

 while in the Bad Lands the riders unhesitatingly go down and over 

 places where it seems impossible that a horse should even stand. The 

 line of horsemen will quarter down the side of a butte, where every pony 

 has to drop from ledge to ledge like a goat, and will go over the shoulder 

 of a soapstone cliff, when wet and slippery, with a series of plunges and 

 scrambles which if unsuccessful would land horses and riders in the bot- 

 tom of the canon-like washout below. In descending a clay butte after 

 a rain, the pony will put all four feet together and slide down to the bot- 

 tom almost or quite on his haunches. In very wet weather the Bad 

 Lands are absolutely impassable ; but if the ground is not slippery, it is a 

 remarkable place that can shake the matter-of-course confidence felt by 

 the rider in the capacity of his steed to go anywhere. 



When the men on the outside circle have reached the bound set 

 them, whether it is a low divide, a group of jagged hills, the edge 

 of the rolling, limitless prairie, or the long, waste reaches of alkali and 

 sage brush, they turn their horses' heads and begin to work down the 

 branches of the creeks, one or two riding down the bottom, while the 

 others keep off to the right and the left, a little ahead and fairly high up 

 on the side hills, so as to command as much of a view as possible. On 

 the level or rolling prairies the cattle can be seen a long way off, and it is 

 an easy matter to gather and to drive them ; but in the Bad Lands every 

 little pocket, basin, and coulee has to be searched, every gorge or ravine 

 entered, and the dense patches of brushwood and spindling, wind-beaten 

 trees closely examined. All the cattle are carried on ahead down the 

 creek; and it is curious to watch the different behavior of the different 

 breeds. A cowboy riding off to one side of the creek, and seeing a num- 

 ber of long-horned Texans grazing in the branches of a set of coulees, 

 has merely to ride across the upper ends of these, uttering the drawn-out 

 " ei-koh-h-h," so familiar to the cattle-men, and the long-horns will stop 

 grazing, stare fixedly at him, and then, wheeling, strike off down the 

 coulees at a trot, tails in air, to be carried along by the center riders 



