But when they had shown us how very simple a matter this was, they were told to dismount and to rope the horses by whichever foot Mr. Kleberg choose to select. This was a real combat, and was as intensely interesting a contest between a thoroughly wild and terrified animal and a perfectly cool man as one can see, except, perhaps, at a bull-fight. There is something in a contest of this sort that has appealed to something in all human beings who have blood in their veins from the days when one gladiator followed another with a casting-net and a trident around the arena down to the present, when “Peter” Poe drops on one knee and tries to throw Hefflefinger over his shoulder. In this the odds were in favor of the horse, as a cowboy on the ground is as much out of his element as a sailor on a horse, and looks as strangely. The boys moved and ran and backed away as quickly as their heavy leggings would permit; but the horses moved just twice as quickly, turning and jumping and rearing, and then racing away out of reach again at a gallop. But whenever they came within range of the ropes, they fell. The roping around the neck had seemed simple. The rope then was cast in a loop with a noose at one end as easily as one throws a trout line. But now the rope had to be hurled as quickly and as surely as a man sends a ball to first base when the batsman is running, except that the object at which the cowboy aims is moving at a gallop, and one of a galloping horse’s four feet is a most uncertain bull’s-eye. It is almost impossible to describe the swiftness with which the rope moved. It seemed to skim across the ground as a skipping-rope does when a child holds one end of it and shakes the rope up and down to make it look like a snake coiling and undulating over the pavement. One instant the rope would hang coiled from the thrower’s right hand as he ran forward to meet the horse, moving it slowly, with a twist of his wrist, to keep it from snarling, and the next it would spin out along the ground, with the noose rolling like a hoop in the front, and would close with a snap over the horse’s hoof, and the cowboy would throw himself back to take the shock, and the horse would come down on its side as though the ground had slipped from under it. The roping around the neck was the easy tossing of a quoit; the roping around the leg was the angry snapping of a whip. There are thousands of other ranches in the United States besides those in Texas, and other cowboys, but the general characteristics are the same in all, and it is only general characteristics that one can attempt to give. [Illustration] VI ON AN INDIAN RESERVATION VI ON AN INDIAN RESERVATION