Engaged in opposite directions, not many of the men of Abilene or of Del Sol noted what happened. There came out of the dust, spurring forward, only one slim ragged rider—who even had left his beloved horses—the boy Cinquo Centavos who, so it seemed, had some sort of admiration and understanding of the lead steer of Del Sol. Excited, tears streaming down his dusty face as always in his moments of tension, Cinquo spurred up to the railroad track and sprang down where the great steer lay struggling. His was the first rope that ever sang in Abilene streets. It caught the great steer over the horns and laid him flat, the pony setting back even as his rider left the saddle. “Oh, Alamo!” wept Cinquo, seating himself on the steer’s muzzle to quiet his plunging. “You done busted that laig plumb off!” “Now, ain’t that too bad!” said one of the more sober musicians, who now strolled over from the Drovers’ Cottage. “Here, you!” commanded Cinquo. “You go back to that cart where the nigger woman is at and get her to give you the hide of that yearlin’ we killed yesterday. “Gentlemen,” continued Cinquo, drawing himself up to his full height, after he had the victim properly strung out, “this may be a cow town, but you-all don’t know nothing about cows. Now look at that! Just because it’s Fourth of July, you think you got any right to bust the best damn steer that ever come out of Texas?” Alamo and Cinquo were to take the first curtain call. The boy was no theorist. Under his direction they brought him some pieces of barrel staves. Around these he wound again and again strips of the green hide, stretching it tight—perhaps the first surgery on a Texas steer, if not the last, ever known on the long trail up from the Southern lands. “Rawhide,” explained Cinquo to the gathering group, “is the holdin’est thing there is. Once that dries, that steer’s laig will be a lot better’n new—if it don’t dry too tight. Is them the pens over yon?” he continued. “Well, swing a pole acrost the sides of the chute. Some of you-all go and git some grass or hay. We’ll make a belly-band o’ the rest of the hide and swing him up offen the ground so it won’t hurt his sore laig. “This here steer’s name is Alamo,” he explained to his audience. “He’s the onliest Texas cow or horse I ever knowed to have a name. But he started through. What us Texans starts we finishes. Git back now and leave me if he can stand up.” Old Alamo, relieved of rope and with no weight on his neck, proved his mettle by springing to his feet as though nothing had happened, and only the strange feeling in his foreleg prevented his charging the crowd as an evidence of good faith. But Cinquo impressed Sanchez, who was visible coming up, and Alamo yielded to the force of numbers and of skill. A man flung open the gate of the Abilene Stockyards. Alamo entered in.