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leather gloves to protect his hands from the skinning thorns, but Shorty didn’t, claiming they choked him. His hands, littered with painful scratches and scars, paid the price.
    Being a small man, Shorty always figured he had a lot to prove. He was ready to risk life and limb at the blink of an eye. There were some who wondered how he managed to reach the age of seventeen and still be alive. His short, stocky build had the iron muscles of an older man, and the experience of countless frays was etched in his broad-featured face. Shorty was always the first to volunteer and the last to quit. He was a feisty friend, but Benteen wouldn’t have wanted him for an enemy.
    Neither man spoke as they slowly walked their horses through the brush. Talking required effort, and energy was saved for the chase. They rode past a coma bush with dirklike thorns. Its winter blossoms of small white flowers scented the air with a cloying fragrance; even that couldn’t cover up the stench of the four-foot-long rattlesnake lying in their path, trampled to death two days before. It was a sickening but familiar smell to any man who frequented the thickets, emitted by angry rattlers in their death throes.
    The line-backed dun hesitated in its stride and stopped. Benteen was immediately alert to the signals of his brush-wise mount. The dun’s nose and pricked ears pointed toward a solid wall of mesquite. As the horse trembled eagerly beneath him, Benteen spotted the almost camouflaged roan cow, and the twisted horns of a second. The animals remained motionless, hunkered down in the brush, until they were certain they’d been seen.
    Beside him, Shorty let out a Texas yell, a piercing sound that crossed a Comanche war whoop with a rebel yell. With the nerves released, both riders spurred theirhorses at the hidden Longhorns. Nature bred the Longhorns with the agility of a deer, enabling them to bound to their feet in one leap and be in a dead run by the next.
    There didn’t seem to be any opening in the thicket, but where a cow could go, a horse could follow. It was up to the riders to stay on board the best way they knew how.
    Benteen took after the roan cow while Shorty split away after the second Longhorn. They hit the brush at a run and tore a hole through it—a hole that seemed to close up the instant they were through. Branches popped and snapped; thorny limbs raked his leather leggings and tore at his clothes. To avoid being scraped off his horse, Benteen was all over the saddle, dodging and ducking, flattening himself along the dun’s neck, then stretching along the opposite side. He used his arms, his legs, his hands, his shoulders, his whole body, to shield his head from the thorny branches trying to gouge out his eyes. Benteen didn’t dare close them or he’d lose control and not see the next limb. Like the tawny horse he rode, Benteen was oblivious of everything but the curved horns of the roan cow racing through the brush ahead of them.
    It was a brutal, hair-raising race to catch up with the red roan. In this dense growth, there wasn’t room for long ropes and wide loops. As the dun gelding closed in on the wild cow, Benteen waited until he had a small opening in the brush the size of a saddle blanket. With a short rope, he reached over and cast his loop up to circle the cow’s head, taking advantage of the sparse plant growth close to the ground.
    The dun horse bunched and gathered itself to absorb the yank when the cow hit the end of the rope. When the loop tightened around its neck to pull it up short, it let out a bellow of fear and anger. Plunging and fighting at the restraint, the roan cow hooked its horn at the rope, but didn’t charge the rider, as some of her breed did.
    After an initially lengthy struggle, the cow turned out to be one of the more amenable ones, and grudgingly obeyed the pull of the rope, permitting Benteen to lead her from the thicket. Sometimes the wild cattle had