Ted Smith, flinging his long legs off a frisky bay, grinned delightedly as his eye caught a flag-decked touring car.
“Are you riding?” called the boy at the wheel.
“Sure AM!” drawled the ranch boy. “How about yourself?”
“Betcher life, Old Kid!” Ace King flung himself to the ground, disclosing the fact of his new leather chaps – a contrast to Ted’s overalls. Greetings followed between Ted and Senator King in the back seat, and Pedro Martinez, a black-eyed young fellow who sat a pinto pony alongside.
The slanting rays of California sunshine were fanned by a breeze from Huntington Lake, as the crowd sifted about the corral fence at Cedar Crest. The prevailing khaki of the dusty onlookers gave way at intervals to a splash of color. An Indian in a purple shirt was borrowing the orange chaps of another broncho-buster; he had drawn number two from the hat. Most of the cowmen offset their “two-quart” sombreros with brilliant-hued bandannas knotted loosely at their throats. A few wore chaparreras in stamped leather, and a few in goatskin – red or black or tan – though most let it go at plain blue overalls. One of the machines drawn up beside the soda-pop stand fluttered a flag on its nose. For the Fourth was to be marked by a reading of the Declaration of Independence before the rodeo and barbecue. (The day had begun with a Parade of Horribles, in which every last lumberman took part, chanting the marching song to an accompaniment of well-belabored frying-pans.)
Unbidden, a band of unspeakably unwashed Digger Indians, attired in gay and ill-assorted rags, appeared, and seated themselves on the opposite hill-side, beaming vacuously as the ox was put in the pit to roast (together with two smaller carcasses that the camp cook winkingly designated as wild mutton, though he was careful to bury the antlers against the possible advent of the Forest Ranger).
The rodeo master, a megaphone-voiced blond giant, in high-heeled riding boots and spurs that made him limp when he walked, careened up and down the dusty field on a high-stepping bay, while two lasso men in steel-studded belts and leather cuffs helped round the range stock into the adjoining small corral.
An unbroken two-year-old with wild, rolling eyes tried to climb the fence when the rope tightened on his throat, and a sleek mule kicked out in a way that left a red mark on the flank of a lean white mare. Then one of the bulls in a separate corral shoved his head under the lower of the two log bars that fenced him in and lifted – lifted, – but could not break through.
“Riding, old Scout?” Ted asked the young Spanish-Californian.
“’Fraid I’d ride the ground,” admitted Pedro, with a gesture of his plump, manicured hands.
“Yeh! – Saw-horse’s HIS mount!” jollied Ace, though the pinto looked by no means spiritless. (And to himself he added: “Likely promised his mother not to. Gee! I’d like to cut him loose from her apron strings for about three months and see how he’d pan out!”)
“He’s got too much sense to risk his bones,” championed the Senator, (a heavy, florid man with a leonine mass of white curly hair and Ace’s daring black eyes).
Just then a petite young woman rode up, her bobbed curly hair and sun-flushed cheeks topping a red silk blouse joined to her khaki riding breeches by a fringed sash that reached half way to her elkskin boots.
“I say, Rosa, are you riding?” greeted Ace. The girl shook her head merrily. “Dad, that’s Pierre La Coste’s sister, – you know, he’s fire-lookout on Red Top. Used to be one of our Scouts when we lived in Peach Cove.”
“Yeh, we used to call him Pur-r-r,” supplemented the ranch boy.
“And that’s the horse Ranger Radcliffe’s been trying to give her,” added Ace, sotto voce. “Isn’t he a beauty?”
“And she won’t have him?” laughed the Senator.
“Won’t have man or beast.”
Ace, now studying geology at the University of California, though he had traveled widely since the old ranch days, still counted Ted, sandy haired, thin and freckled, struggling to make his mother’s fruit ranch a go, his chum. Pedro, a neighbor of the old days, was his roommate in the fraternity house at Berkeley. All three ran to greet Norris, a young man in the uniform of the U. S. Geological Survey (son of the Forest Supervisor), who now appeared, galloping beside Ranger Radcliffe. For he was to pilot them on a camping trip into the high Sierras in a week or two.
