wouldn’t have wanted to laugh so.  If I had had a horse worth a cent—­but no, the minute he saw that buffalo bull wheel on him and give a bellow, he raised straight up in the air and stood on his heels.  The saddle began to slip, and I took him round the neck and laid close to him, and began to pray.  Then he came down and stood up on the other end awhile, and the bull actually stopped pawing sand and bellowing to contemplate the inhuman spectacle.

“Then the bull made a pass at him and uttered a bellow that sounded perfectly frightful, it was so close to me, and that seemed to literally prostrate my horse’s reason, and make a raving distracted maniac of him, and I wish I may die if he didn’t stand on his head for a quarter of a minute and shed tears.  He was absolutely out of his mind—­he was, as sure as truth itself, and he really didn’t know what he was doing.  Then the bull came charging at us, and my horse dropped down on all fours and took a fresh start—­and then for the next ten minutes he would actually throw one hand-spring after another so fast that the bull began to get unsettled, too, and didn’t know where to start in—­and so he stood there sneezing, and shovelling dust over his back, and bellowing every now and then, and thinking he had got a fifteen-hundred dollar circus horse for breakfast, certain.  Well, I was first out on his neck—­the horse’s, not the bull’s—­and then underneath, and next on his rump, and sometimes head up, and sometimes heels—­but I tell you it seemed solemn and awful to be ripping and tearing and carrying on so in the presence of death, as you might say.  Pretty soon the bull made a snatch for us and brought away some of my horse’s tail (I suppose, but do not know, being pretty busy at the time), but something made him hungry for solitude and suggested to him to get up and hunt for it.

“And then you ought to have seen that spider legged old skeleton go! and you ought to have seen the bull cut out after him, too—­head down, tongue out, tail up, bellowing like everything, and actually mowing down the weeds, and tearing up the earth, and boosting up the sand like a whirlwind!  By George, it was a hot race!  I and the saddle were back on the rump, and I had the bridle in my teeth and holding on to the pommel with both hands.  First we left the dogs behind; then we passed a jackass rabbit; then we overtook a cayote, and were gaining on an antelope when the rotten girth let go and threw me about thirty yards off to the left, and as the saddle went down over the horse’s rump he gave it a lift with his heels that sent it more than four hundred yards up in the air, I wish I may die in a minute if he didn’t.  I fell at the foot of the only solitary tree there was in nine counties adjacent (as any creature could see with the naked eye), and the next second I had hold of the bark with four sets of nails and my teeth, and the next second after that I was astraddle of the main limb and blaspheming