SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE VOL. LXXXI MAY, 1927 All in the Day's Riding "WOUND UP" BY WILL JAMES Author of "Smoky, the Cowhorse," etc. ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR IN the cowboy's work and of the many things that causes him to act mighty quick at times, there's nothing that can compete with the rope, nothing, unless it's a bronc's four feet. That long, far-reaching string of whale line with a loop at the end can find more ways of coming back at the man that throws it than anything I know of. It can sail out as pretty as you please, settle over a critter's horns, and upset 'er to lay in a good tying position. Ninetynine times out of a hundred it does that for the man that can manipulate it well, but even with the good roper there comes times when that plain and harmless looking hard-twist-manila turns like a snake and quicker than lightning, circles around the cowboy's body and near cuts the life out of him before he can even see it come. Folks might wonder what could make a innocent little rope be so wicked as to act that way, and the explaining is not easy, but First, it's the horse you're roping off of, he don't always behave, and then again he might be just a raw bronc unedicated to the ways of the rope. Second, is the steer the loop has slipped up onto, he's got lots of wild weight and he don't know that a rope has an end, so, when he hits that end while going full speed ahead is when something always does bust. NO. 5 If all's well the steer will be the one to "lay," but sometimes the horse and rider does the laying stunt instead, and that's what leads to things happening, happening too fast for the eye to follow. . . There's where the little rope comes in, then's when she does her winding, and when all's over and the dust settles again there's neat rope burns which for a long time afterward keeps reminding.. But that ain't all a rope can do, she has many other tricks which keeps the cowboy's eye and hand on the slack. Like one day for instance, me and Hippy Darrell was on "circle" and as usual, combing the range for whatever stock we'd see. We'd rounded up quite a little bunch and was headed for camp with 'em when from our left comes a sudden streak of dust. What made it was headed straight for us and pretty soon we could make out the shape of a steer. He kept a coming, and as we watched we could see by his actions that he was on a rampage. Something had sure stirred him up, and as he joined the cattle we was driving in he never seemed to notice us none at all. His head was high and he was seeing red, and somehow with that pair of long well-curved horns he was packing he was sure good to look at. Hippy edged up to within speaking distance, and grinning, he remarked, "Somebody's turned him once too often." "Yep," I agrees. "It don't take much to make 'em want to fight sometimes, Copyrighted in 1927 in United States, Canada, and Great Britain by Charles Scribner's Sons. There was a mixture of steer, horse, horns, winding ropes, and a man.-Page 454. wind, and from then on he begin to find fault, the bunch was going too slow, and besides they wasn't going the right direction for him. He begin going back and forth through the bunch. Once in a while he'd go out of it only to come back again and kept that up till, instead of cooling down to behaving, his fighting spirit stayed up to the boiling point and edged him on to do everything but what seemed right and natural. We left him alone. If he went out of the herd we'd let him come back by himself and tried not to let on that we was driving him along, but no matter what he done we was going to take that big boy in to the "cutting grounds" where all nobody around to turn him he'd then turn of his own accord and come back to the herd. We looked for him to quiet down, but it seemed like he had no such intentions, and he'd got us to the point where we wanted to stretch our ropes on him and roll him over a few times, just to sort of give him all the trouble he was looking for and a little edication to boot. He went out once more, and the way he held his head, curved his backbone, and kinked his tail all a challenging, we knowed he wasn't figgering on coming back no more. Hippy looked at me and grinned, and I grinned back. Two shakes and our ropes split the air into loops, our spur rowels |