body that was goin’ to look for Dead Hoss Valley and come across this picture, why, he’d jest light off’n his bronco and hunt a place to camp.”
Skinny Rogers, wedded to comedy, conceived a complimentary little piece of acting that never failed to make an impression. Edging quite near to the picture, he would suddenly, at favourable moments emit a piercing and awful “Yi-yi!” leap high and away, coming down with a great stamp of heels and whirring of rowels upon the stoneflagged floor.
“Jeeming Christopher!’’—so ran his lines—“thought that rattler was a gin-u-ine one. Ding baste my skin if I did n’t. Seemed to me I heard him rattle. Look at the blamed, unconverted insect a-layin’ under that pear. Little more, and somebody would a-been snake-bit.”
With these artful dodges, contributed by Lonny’s faithful coterie, with the sonorous Kinney perpetually sounding the picture’s merits, and with the solvent prestige of the pioneer Briscoe covering it like a precious varnish, it seemed that the San Saba country could not fail to add a reputation as an art centre to its well-known superiority in steer-roping contests and achievements with the precarious busted flush. Thus was created for the picture an atmosphere, due rather to externals than to the artist’s brush, but through it the people seemed to gaze with more of admiration. There was a magic in the name of Briscoe that counted high against faulty technique and crude colouring. The old Indian fighter and wolf slayer would have smiled grimly in his happy hunting grounds had he known that his dilettante ghost was
