He flung his arms about me, with a look of the South in his eyes,
full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like Italy made
real for one instant of golden time.
But if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of some quiet sunlit
gallery of Monte Beni, I soon found it was into the frontier of our
western border. A herd of Texas ponies were to be immediately on sale,
and I went to see them--wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, who
had never known bit or spur; they were lariated and thrown down, as the
buyers picked them out, and then led and pulled away to man's life. It
was a typical scene: the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together and
startled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose resolute habit sat
on them like cotillion grace--athletes in the grain--with the gray,
close garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark under the broad
sombrero, the belted revolver, the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand,
quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the master in his craft,
now pulling down a pony without a struggle, and now showing strength and
dexterity against frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and our
spoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at least that
every moment my friend's eye was on me, and he kept saying, "They're
wild, mind!" The next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness,
and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due north
to the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast American land
that bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles that
stretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and
brain,--brothers and friends.
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