“There goes ol’ Pete. Blast him, if he ain’t hitting only the high spots,” Dave bawled.
At this moment his attention was called to Sam. The mule’s head was thrown high, the usually slouching ears were rigid and pricked forward, and he was sniffing the air restlessly. Once he made an abrupt lurch sideways as though to follow the free rovers, but the bit sawed his mouth, the collar and traces bound him and he could only champ impatiently. If a mule really knows how to tremble, Sam was trembling then--it was more a twitching of the muscles. The band was lost to sight and sound. Dave called a raucous command and once more they settled to work. Again Sam became listless and applied himself lethargically to pulling.
A cool breeze whipped among the scrub-cedar of the foothills and went whining down the valley. Above the black rim of El Toro rose a rich, golden disc. Its pale light softened the outlines of the forms asleep upon the ground; in that kindly radiance the chuck-wagon and the unsightly confusion of camp merged into blurs that harmonized with the giant shadow of the mountain. The night was full of murmurings, tense with the suggestion of strange other worlds. Surely the plaintive wailing the breeze bore to Sam from El Toro’s pines was a message.
He stood with his nose up wind and drew in the scents of the wilds. His forelegs were hobbled, the rope twisted about them so tightly that he could barely shuffle when he grazed, and near at hand twelve horses were staked out. One of them, hopelessly entangled in his rope, was fighting it in terror; already he was on his knees unable to do aught but cut himself. In a draw a half-mile away the remuda cropped the grass under the eyes of a triple guard, for Uncle Henry was mindful of the manager’s warning, and upon Dave’s report he took no chances.
Out from the shadow cast by a mesquite bush a coyote skulked, and Sam snorted and shook his head in anger. The beast’s scent offended him, but he was not afraid. Somewhere in the dark a wildcat cried and the mule cocked his ears to listen. Next moment he jumped awkwardly aside as a polecat scurried by on a hunt for food.
The mule was growing restive. It was not nervousness--a mule is rarely nervous or frightened. When he runs away or pitches or balks, it is seldom because something has put fear into him; it is refined cussedness. Anyone who ever succeeded in owning a mule longer than a month will tell you that.