Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER THREE THE TENDERFOOT'S TRIALS A PER the conquest—for the time being, at least, complete—of " Walkingbars," the worst outlaw bronco in the N. D. brand, I felt the crisis of my trials as a tenderfoot was passed. But this proved erroneous—widely. Most of the punchers hailed my success with " Walkingbars" with satisfaction, and showed me a cordiality that made me feel that I had at least one foot drawn out of the slough of tender- footdom. But one man seemed actually to resent my good fortune—the evil-tempered foreman, Con Humphreys. He may not have wanted me killed outright, but he certainly did seem to want to see me more or less maimed or disfigured. Indeed, the only thing that made at all endurable his general mental attitude toward the outfit at large and each puncher in particular, was the fact that he seemed to hate himself quite as cordially as he 'did the rest of us. His was a mirthless life, devoid even of any sense of pleasure except when engaged in inflicting some needless cruelty he judged could not be resented. Already Humphreys had been stacking me up against the toughest and some of the riskiest tasks of round-up work; tasks to try the skill and nerve of the oldest rawhide of them all; and when, as often happened, I acquitted myself none too well, he sneered at and abused me all he dared with a protege of his boss, N. R. The very morning after I first saddled and rode " Walkingbars," and it had begun to dawn upon his shrewd equine brain that it paid well to curb his savage temper and permit mastery to a puncher who handled him gently and spoke to him kindly, Con's malignant disposition cropped out anew. When out an hour from the lower Willow corral, the herd in hand strung out a mile or more along the winding trail up-stream, a many-tinted ri...