And he was wise in trails. Twice he rejected the
courses which Terry picked, and the rider very wisely let him have his
way. The result was that they took a more winding, but a far safer
course, and arrived before midmorning in the bottomlands.
The first ranch house he applied to accepted him. And there he took up
his work.
It was the ordinary outfit--the sun- and wind-racked shack for a house,
the stumbling outlying barns and sheds, and the maze of corral fences.
They asked Terry no questions, accepted his first name without an
addition, and let him go his way.
He was happy enough. He had not the leisure for thought or for
remembering better times. If he had leisure here and there, he used it
industriously in teaching El Sangre the "cow" business. The stallion
learned swiftly. He began to take a joy in sitting down on a rope.
At the end of a week Terry won a bet when a team of draught horses
hitched onto his line could not pull El Sangre over his mark, and broke
the rope instead. There was much work, too, in teaching him to turn in
the cow-pony fashion, dropping his head almost to the ground and bunching
his feet altogether.
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