Classic Cowboy Stories by Michael Mccoy

Author:Michael Mccoy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781599217291
Publisher: Lyons Press

Catching a Maverick

FRANK BENTON

One day while waiting for a gravel train going west, we all got to talking about catching mavericks. Eatumup Jake said he’d always been too honest to go out on the range and hunt mavericks; Dillbery Ike said he was too, but he wasn’t so durned honest as to let a maverick chase him out of his own corral, and they asked me what I thought about branding mavericks. I told them that I thought it was a bad practice to hunt mavericks all the time, but whenever a maverick came around hunting me up, I generally built a fire and put a branding iron in to heat. But I told them I would always remember one maverick I had an adventure with, and after they had all promised me not to ever tell the story to any one, I told them the following:

One hot day in the spring of ’84 I started across the hills from my ranch to town, fifteen miles away. I generally had a good riata on my saddle, but this day, for some reason, I didn’t take anything but a piece of rope fifteen feet long. I didn’t expect to meet any mavericks, as it was just after the spring roundup and there wasn’t a chance in a hundred of seeing one. My way was across a high, broken country, without a house or a ranch the entire distance. There was bunches of cattle and horses everywhere eating the luxuriant grass, drinking out of the clear running streams of mountain water or lying down too full to eat or drink any more. I was riding one of my best hosses, as everybody did when they went to town; had my high-heeled boots blacked till you could see your face in them; was wearing a brand-new $12 Stetson hat that was made to order; had on a pair of new California pants—they were sort of a lavender color with checks an inch square, and I was more than proud of them. I had on a white silk shirt and a blue silk handkerchief round my neck, a red silk vest with black polka dots on it, but didn’t have any coat to match this brilliant costume, so was in my shirt sleeves.

I rode along, setting kind of side ways, my hat cocked over my ear, a-looking down at myself from time to time, and I was about the most self-satisfied cowpuncher ever was, didn’t envy a saloon-keeper in the territory, and saloon-keepers had as much influence in Wyoming them days as a sheepman does now, and that’s saying all you can say, when it’s known that the sheepmen to-day in Wyoming fill almost every office, elective and appointive.

Well I had got about half way to town and was a-studying ’bout a girl I bid goodbye to in the East fifteen years before, and sort a-wishing she could see me now, when all of a sudden I looked up and right there, not fifty feet away, was a big, fat, black bull maverick.

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