Bill sighed and eased his stiffened muscles in the big chair. "Well, I
don't blame either one of you," he drawled somewhat wistfully. "If I was
fifteen years limberer and fifty pounds slimmer, I dunno but what I'd
set into this ranch game myself. It's sure peaceful."
Foolishly they agreed that it was.
CHAPTER XIV
RODEO TIME
In those days of large leisure and cyclonic bursts of excitement and
activity; of midday siestas and moonlight serenades--and a duel,
perchance, at sunrise--the spring rodeo was one of the year's events, to
be looked forward to all winter by the vaqueros; and when it was over,
to be talked of afterwards for months. A mark from which to measure the
passing of time, it was; a date for the fixing of incidents in the
memory of men.
In the valley of Santa Clara, rodeo time really began when the Picardo
vaqueros cinched saddles upon restive mustangs some misty morning, and
with shouts and laughter and sombreros waving high over black heads in
adieu to those who remained behind, swept down the slope like a charge
of gayly caparisoned cavalry, driving the loose saddle horses before
them. Past the stone and adobe wall of the home pasture, past the fences
where the rails were held to their posts with rawhide thongs, which the
coyotes sometimes chewed to pulp and so made extra work for the peons,
they raced, exultant with life. Slim young Spaniards they were, clothed
picturesquely in velvet and braid and gay sashes; with cumbersome, hairy
chaparejos, high-crowned sombreros and big-roweled, silver spurs to mark
their calling; caballeros to flutter the heart of a languorous-eyed
senorita, and to tingle the pulse of the man who could command and see
them ride gallantly to do his bidding.
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