accepted as the mascot of the ranch and made into a "sure-enough"
cowboy by cowboys who, on legal papers, legally signed names such as
Wild Horse, Willie Buck, Boomer Deacon, and High Pockets.

Here, during a stay of six months, Young Dick, soft of frame and
unbreakable, achieved a knowledge of horses and horsemanship, and of
men in the rough and raw, that became a life asset. More he learned.
There was John Chisum, owner of the Jingle-bob, the Bosque Grande, and
of other cattle ranches as far away as the Black River and beyond.
John Chisum was a cattle king who had foreseen the coming of the
farmer and adjusted from the open range to barbed wire, and who, in
order to do so, had purchased every forty acres carrying water and got
for nothing the use of the millions of acres of adjacent range that
was worthless without the water he controlled. And in the talk by the
camp-fire and chuck wagon, among forty-dollar-a-month cowboys who had
not foreseen what John Chisum foresaw, Young Dick learned precisely
why and how John Chisum had become a cattle king while a thousand of
his contemporaries worked for him on wages.

But Young Dick was no cool-head. His blood was hot. He had passion,
and fire, and male pride. Ready to cry from twenty hours in the
saddle, he learned to ignore the thousand aching creaks in his body
and with the stoic brag of silence to withstain from his blankets
until the hard-bitten punchers led the way. By the same token he
straddled the horse that was apportioned him, insisted on riding
night-herd, and knew no hint of uncertainty when it came to him to
turn the flank of a stampede with a flying slicker. He could take a
chance. It was his joy to take a chance. But at such times he never
failed of due respect for reality. He was well aware that men were
soft-shelled and cracked easily on hard rocks or under pounding hoofs.