“Oh, that there is all right!” Higgins grinned, as he strung his riata across the gymnasium floor, to make sure it was in good condition. “This hyer ain’t fer blood, ye know! Jist a little fun, to please Merry and t’other fellers! I hear tell there’s another feller that’s got a picture he’d like to turn to the wall.”
“Picture of a hoss!” grunted Higgins, critically examining his rope and working at it with his fingers to take out an incipient kink which he fancied he had found. “I’m going to hold that agin’ you!”
“Yes, so I heerd. But I’m a lover of hosses, and I don’t like to have even a picture of one fooled with. That makes me willin’ to champion these pore freshmen fellers to-night, and I’ll string ropes fer ’em fer all I’m wu’th.”
Indeed, Higgins was going into the contest with “blood in his eye.” He believed that he was a better roper than the man from El Paso, even if Bludsoe had been engaged in giving public exhibitions of his roping proficiency, and he was glad of this chance. Higgins delighted in keeping himself in the public eye. Though he was a noble fellow in many respects, he was as vain as a peacock, and he “felt his oats considerably” that night, as he stretched his riata across the floor and walked round in his new cowboy clothing, with his great spurs musically clinking and jingling on his heels.
Bludsoe was a lithe, wiry man, younger than Higgins and smaller. He wore a smooth face, which was as bronzed as a copper mask. It was a sharp, hatchety face, keen and shrewd—the typical face of the cowboy of the plains, whose intense activity, combined with the dry, sap-extracting climate, tends to keep down all superfluity of flesh.
The opening feature of the contest was an attempt to pull down a tin cup hung by its handle on a nail against a post. A large roping-space had been cleared in the gymnasium by removing some muscle-strengthening machines and horizontal bars.
The room was filled to overflowing, the pushing, laughing crowd seemingly the more jolly because the night without was windy and inclement.
“Makes me think of the plains,” chirped Higgins, as, in a lull of the noise, he heard the singing of the wind round the building. “A feller that’s lived with the wind as I have sort o’ likes to hear its mournful whistle. I’ve heerd it sing that way, wrapped in my blanket, with the stars shinin’ brighter’n diamonds; and oncet I remember it had thet wail when me and some other fellers was lying in a sod house, with the Pawnees creepin’ onto us through the grass.”