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CINCHFOOT
THE STORY OF A RANGE HORSE
By Thomas C. Hinkle
Author’s Note
CINCHFOOT and Blaze Face, under different names, are based on real characters. The remarkable friendship between them was a reality. Horsemen of the West, including Lloyd Hardin and John Campbell, have more than once told me of the two horses and their unusual friendship for each other. Nor was this the only incident in the West when a gelding befriended a small colt and a friendship sprang up between the two that lasted throughout life.
When Cinchfoot was last heard of he was twenty-three years old, living on a ranch in Montana. It was said by those who saw him at the time that he was in excellent health and as beautiful as ever. Old Blaze Face lived to be twenty-six years of age before he crossed the Great Divide.
T. C. H.
I: Cinchfoot
THE day had suddenly turned dark as night, as one of the worst rain storms of the West roared across the open valley. The small herd of range horses ran with all their might before the driving wind and rain. They were led by a big black gelding with a white face, known as Blaze Face. Close on the heels of this big leader ran a yearling colt, destined to be known as Cinchfoot. He was of a striking color, being coal black with white, or what was called silver, mane and tail. It is true he did not as yet have much mane and tail, but it was growing and he was already big for a yearling. It was plain enough, also, that he could run. Blaze Face led all the others, but Cinchfoot had no trouble keeping up. He was right on the heels of the big horse and it seemed to him they should go faster still. Here and there, as the lightning glared, stood tall pine trees, their branches moving and battling with the driving storm. Frequently deafening crashes of thunder sounded, and as the horses rushed past the scattering timber, a tall pine was struck and knocked into splinters by a lurid streak of fire. It was a storm of unusual severity for this time of the year.
Suddenly, only a few yards ahead, a glaring bolt of lightning struck the ground, making the earth quiver and tremble. A deafening blast followed and the horses were almost knocked down. They stopped suddenly, the big gelding, Blaze Face, going back on his haunches in the effort. Cinchfoot also stopped suddenly and in the blackness that followed he felt a pain in his head and small stars seemed to be glimmering before his eyes.
He and all the other horses were dazed, but the cold rain pelting down on them brought them to their senses. Blaze Face leaped forward again, trying to find shelter from the driving rain, and they all followed. He had led them but a short distance when another blinding flash of lightning showed him he was almost on the verge of a river at the flood. A cloudburst had fallen upstream and the river rushed down madly at this point, its banks overflowing. Had the horses run into the river here the seething torrent would have picked them up like so many corks and carried them down between the high rocky walls where they would all have been drowned. Blaze Face stopped, then in the black darkness that followed the blinding flash, he turned and ran eastward through the driving sheets of rain. But again he stopped suddenly. The river made a sharp turn here and again he had stopped the range horses just in time. This time Blaze Face whirled and led his small band of followers for some distance into the face of the storm, when he stopped and turned his tail toward the driving wind and rain. The other horses all clustered around him, including the yearling colt, Cinchfoot. He stood close against Blaze Face. In fact he was always close to the big gelding. As the two stood here, side by side, Blaze Face put his nose to Cinchfoot’s and in some way let him know they would have to stay here and “take it.” This was enough for Cinchfoot. From the time the colt was very small Blaze Face had taken a strange liking to him and when Cinchfoot’s mother stumbled into a badger hole one day and broke her leg, dying where she fell, Blaze Face took the whole responsibility of looking after the little colt. Cinchfoot was hardly three months old when the accident happened. Blaze Face was one of those unusual geldings seen now and then in the West that, as the cowboys expressed it, “liked the little fellers.”
The wind and rain at times drove down so hard that the horses jerked up their heads and jostled each other about, each trying for a better place, but it was no use. They had to take the full force of cold rain as it drove against them. At times Cinchfoot could hardly breathe as the rain drove into his eyes and nostrils and even his mouth, but he only stood closer to Blaze Face and snorted to get the water out of his nose. Now and then he would shake his head and stamp the ground in his impatience. The other horses crowded close to Blaze Face and stood with their tails toward the storm, their heads held low. Cinchfoot stood between Blaze Face and another big horse, so that he was a little protected.
The small herd of horses that stood in the driving storm on this day were range horses and therefore they were used to saddles on their backs and cowboys in the saddles. But there were two unusual horses among them. The big black gelding with the white face, known as Blaze Face, didn’t like to have anybody on his back. He wanted to run wild and be free, and at the same time take a small herd of other range horses with him. So every spring he got a number of horses that didn’t like tame life to run off with him and, as the cowboys said, “look for new country.” But he would no more than get his new grazing place picked out than the cowboys would come riding along and drive him and the others back to the ranch for the spring work. Blaze Face, at this time, was seven years old. He seemed to like the yearling colt that stood beside him here in this storm more than any of the “little fellers” he had ever known.
The other unusual horse was this colt, Cinchfoot. Blaze Face stood right beside him and twice, in the driving rain, put his nose on the trembling colt as if he were trying to say, in cowboy language, “Don’t be too much troubled, little feller, because I aim to take care of you and we’ll get out of all this by and by.”
The cattlemen and the cowboys over a wide range knew Blaze Face. He was a cow horse and one of the worst buckers that anyone had ever put a saddle on. But as one of the cowboys said, he was “plumb crazy about a little colt, him wanting to be more to it than the colt’s mammy.” And so Cinchfoot had a powerful friend in Blaze Face on this day when it seemed that the rain was surely trying to drown him. Cinchfoot did not know that his life had started out in an unusual way, because he had been born in the summer instead of the spring. He did know that he had about frozen during his first winter and that the world was certainly a place where he had had to fight to live almost from the start. But now that he had lived through the first winter he felt as though “he was all horse.” He knew what it was to fight generally. So, while he’d never been in a thing like this before, he went right on fighting as he had against so many other things, including cold and the deep snow drifts of winter. He snorted often as the rain drove down and, now and then, he tried to get his head away from the driving sheets of rain by putting his nose down between Blaze Face and another horse, but when he did that, it seemed that a small river ran down into his nose and tried to strangle him. So he raised his head a little and took the same position as the older horses did and he snorted and blew the water out of his nose and didn’t try to see, just shut his eyes as they did.
Now it happened that old Blaze Face and the small herd of range horses were not quite alone at this time. Two humans were only a little way off. Two cattlemen, Clem Brown, the owner of the ranch, and Sam Blades had been out looking for Blaze Face and the other horses when they saw the storm coming. Clem and Sam, knowing the range, had spurred hard to a shelter they knew about and got into it with their horses. This was an old abandoned mine hole in the hillside just above the plain where the horses now stood. Clem and Sam had taken their horses back into the mine hole, and now both riders stood inside the shelter and looked out at the storm, while the wind drove a fine spray of rain
