Jim Kane - J P S Brown Read Online Free PDF

and the hand that offered it was not going to hurt him. Kane
pulled the halter rope and every time the colt took a step Kane gave
him a bite of grain. The colt began leading up to keep his mouth full
of grain and Kane started petting him on the head, neck, and
shoulders. The colt was overcoming his fear of Kane's hands to get
the grain. Kane led all the colts to the water.
    The next day, after he had watered them, Kane tied
them closer to the tie than he had the day before. He got a gunny
sack and tied ten feet of rope on it. He walked up to the buckskin
and began swinging the sack over his head. The colt kept his head
down and one evil, fearless eye on the whirling sack. He ran against
the tie rope one time, but when he hit the end of it he turned back
without letting it jolt him. This one had a sense of
self-preservation and he had found out the tie rope had an end to it.
Kane let the sack flop against the buckskin's hind legs. The colt let
fly at it with both hind feet like a mule. Kane let the sack fall
behind the colt's front legs. The colt struck at it with both front
feet. The sack landed on his head behind his ears and he bit at it.
The sack fell on his back and the colt let it slide off and
cow-kicked it back at Kane.
    " You take dead aim, don't you, young man?"
Kane said. "You would like to kick me like that, wouldn't you?
Oh, how you would like to do that. Then I would have to mortgage the
homestead to buy myself a new set of grinners."
    Kane sacked the colt until he tired of kicking at it.
What he really wanted was meat, teeth, something that would crunch
satisfactorily, something that would bring out the mortgage papers.
Mortgage Maker. Kane fed him his hay and went to the next colt.
    The black-and-white paint went into a sullen,
uncomprehending frenzy when Kane started sacking him. He had
absolutely no sense of self-preservation. When he hit the end of the
rope he bashed his head against the fence. His head was skinned up
and beginning to swell. Kane gave him three minutes of the sack and
quit him. Maybe tomorrow he would take it better.
    The little bay, Whiskey Talk, was afraid of the sack
at first but he wasn't afraid of Kane. He didn't try to harm the
sack. He turned his head and watched Kane out of both eyes, trying to
figure out what Kane wanted him to do. Kane sacked him until he
stopped trembling and then held some grain in the pan for him.
    Kane spent ten days sacking, hand feeding, and
leading the colts. At the end of that time he was able to get
familiar enough with them so that he could saddle and hackamore them
without blindfolding them and trim their feet without throwing them.
The only one of the lot who wanted Kane's hide was Mortgage Maker,
the buckskin.
    Kane mounted his colts for the first time in a small
crowding pen. The colts couldn't get away from him in there. They
couldn't run and they couldn't buck. He rode them in the pen for a
week. He knew this was cheating them, not giving them a chance to
buck. But he was breaking the colts for business and not for fun.
Anyway, Kane figured, anyone would say nowadays cheating for business
wasn't cheating.
    He rode the colts in the crowding pen until he
figured if he didn't take them outside he and the colts would be
permanently claustrophobic. The colts were responding well to the
hackamore rein and he could get off and on them from both sides
without trouble. He was feeding them out of a morral ,
a feed bag made of a grain sack, and he could catch them with the morral anytime he
wanted to. They had graduated from being tied after the first ten
days and he let them run loose in the corral now.
    One morning Kane caught Mortgage Lifter. He took him
to the crowding pen and saddled him. Mortgage Lifter yawned a few
times. Kane led him in circles and looked him over. Mortgage Lifter
was bored. The colt dragged his gangly, big-boned legs around
clumsily. Kane got on him and trotted him around the pen. Mortgage
Lifter's ears flopped uninterestedly. Kane