They came a patter of feet, and behind 'em a smashing and crashing in the underbrush, and a gal run out of the path into the road, and a rampaging bull was right behind her with his head lowered to toss her. The road wound around the shoulder of a mountain, and ahead of me I seen a narrer path opened into it, and just before I got there I heard a bull beller, and a gal screamed: "Help! Help! Old Man Kirby's bull's loose!" I hadn't never been there before, but I was follering a winding wagon-road which I knowed would eventually fetch me there. SO A COUPLE OF DAYS later I was riding through the Cougar Range, which is very thick-timbered mountains, and rapidly approaching Cougar Paw. My family always imposes onto my good nature generally I'd rather go do what they want me to do than to go to the trouble with arguing with 'em. "When you find him say to him: 'I'm John Elkins' brother, and you can give me what you promised him.'" You'll likely find him in Cougar Paw any day, though." The man's name is Bill Santry, and he lives up in the mountains a few miles from Cougar Paw. Whyn't you go collect for me, Breckinridge? You ought to, dern it, because its yore fault I cain't ride. "I did," he said, "but they is a man up there which has promised me somethin' which is due me, and now I ain't able to go collect. "I thought you just come from there," I says. I won't be able to ride for a day or so, and they is business up to Cougar Paw I ought to 'tend to." "Well," he said, "this here busted foot discommodes me a heap. "I dunno why they should be so much racket over a trifle that didn't amount to nothin', nohow." "Who's holdin' any grudge?" I ast, making sure he didn't have a bowie knife in his left hand. He was laying on his bunk with his foot up on it all bandaged up, and he says: "Breckinridge, they ain't no use in grown men holdin' a grudge.
I went on and made the shoes and put 'em on Cap'n Kidd, which is a job about like roping and hawg-tying a mountain cyclone, and by the time I got through and went up to the cabin to eat, John seemed to have got over his mad spell. He could make more racket about nothing then any Elkins I ever knowed. A little later, from his yells, I gathered that he had persuaded maw or one of the gals to rub his toe with hoss-liniment. "He'll rue the day," promised John, and hobbled off to the cabin with moans and profanity. "It takes me back to the time when, in the days of my happy childhood, I emptied a sawed-off shotgun into the seat of brother Joel's britches for tellin' our old man it was me which put that b'ar-trap in his bunk." "He's busted my toe," said John blood-thirstily, "and I'll have his heart's blood if it's the last thing I do." Just then pap stuck his head in the door and beamed on us, and said: "You boys won't never grow up! Always playin' yore childish games, and sportin' in yore innercent frolics!" John let out a awful holler and begun hopping around over the shop and cussing fit to curl yore hair. He sot his foot up on the anvil and I give it a good slam with the hammer. He bust into loud rude laughter and said: "You call that thing a hossshoe? It's big enough for a snow plow! Here, long as yo're in the business, see can you fit a shoe for that!" "If you ain't got nothin' better to do than criticize a animal which is a damn sight better hoss than you'll ever be a man," I said with dignerty, between licks, "I calls yore attention to a door right behind you which nobody ain't usin' at the moment." I got no use for the toys which most blacksmiths uses for hammers. I taken the white-hot iron out of the forge and put it on the anvil and started beating it into shape with the sixteen-pound sledge I always uses. But I reflected it was just envy on his part, and resisted my natural impulse to bend the tongs over his head. He knows the easiest way to git under my hide is to poke fun at Cap'n Kidd. "That broom-tail ain't wuth the iron you wastes on his splayed-out hooves!" "Air you slavin' over a hot forge for that mangy, flea-bit hunk of buzzard-meat again?" he greeted me. John thinks he's a wit, but I figger he's just half right. When he feels prime like that he wants to rawhide everybody he meets, especially me. He'd been away for a few weeks up in the Cougar Paw country, and he'd evidently done well, whatever he'd been doing, because he was in a first class humor with hisself, and plumb spilling over with high spirits and conceit. I was out in the blacksmith shop by the corral beating out some shoes for Cap'n Kidd, when my brother John come sa'ntering in. 79506 The Riot at Cougar Paw 1935 Robert E.
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