in one of the saddle strings are used when roping, and to keep the
half-inch manila lariat--or mayhap it's horsehair or rawhide
pleated--from burning his hands. The red silken sash one was wont
aforetime to see knotted about his waist, was used to hogtie and hold
down the big cattle when roped and thrown. The sash--strong, soft
and close--could be tied more tightly, quickly, surely than anything
besides. In these days, with wire pastures and branding pens and the
fine certainty of modern round-ups and a consequent paucity of
mavericks, big cattle are seldom roped; wherefor the sash has been
much cast aside.

The saddle-bags or "war-bags,"--also covered of dogskin to match the
leggins, and worn behind, not forward of the rider--are the cowboy's
official wardrobe wherein he carries his second suit of underclothes,
and his other shirt. His handkerchief, red cotton, is loosely
knotted about the cowboy's neck, knot to the rear. He wipes the
sweat from his brow therewith on those hot Texas days when in a
branding pen he "flanks" calves or feeds the fires or handles the
irons or stands off the horned indignation of the cows, resentful
because of burned and bawling offspring.

It would take two hundred thousand words to tell in half fashion the
story of the cowboy. His religion of fatalism, his courage, his
rides at full swing in midnight darkness to head and turn and hold a
herd stampeded, when a slip on the storm-soaked grass by his unshod
pony, or a misplaced prairie-dog hole, means a tumble, and a tumble
means that a hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of cattle, with
hoofs like chopping knives, will run over him and make him look and
feel and become as dead as a cancelled postage stamp; his troubles,
his joys, his soberness in camp, his drunkenness in town, and his