When the third day dawned bleakly, literally blown piecemeal from out
darkness as bleak, the Happy Family rose shiveringly and with sombre
disapproval of whatever met their blood-shot eyes; dressed hurriedly
in the chill of flapping tent and went out to stagger drunkenly over
to where Patsy, in the mess-tent, was trying vainly to keep the
biscuits from becoming dust-sprinkled, and sundry pans and tins from
taking jingling little excursions on their own account. Over the brow
of the next ridge straggled the cavvy, tails and manes whipping in the
gale, the nighthawk swearing so that his voice came booming down to
camp. Truly, the day opened inauspiciously enough for almost any dire
ending.

As further evidence, saddling horses for circle resolved itself, as
Weary remarked at the top of his voice to Pink, at his elbow, into "a
free-for-all broncho busting tournament." For horses have nerves, and
nothing so rasps the nerves of man or beast as a wind that never stops
blowing; which means swaying ropes and popping saddle leather, and
coat-tails flapping like wet sheets on a clothes line. Horses do not
like these things, and they are prone to eloquent manifestations of
their disapproval.

Over by the bed-wagon, a man they called Blink, for want of a better
name, was fighting his big sorrel silently, with that dogged
determination which may easily grow malevolent. The sorrel was at best
a high-tempered, nervous beast, and what with the wind and the
flapping of everything in sight, and the pitching of half-a-dozen
horses around him, he was nearly crazed with fear in the abstract.

Blink was trying to bridle him, and he was not saying a word--which,