Catchrope

Lute Springer halted as abruptly as if he'd been snared by a catchrope.

They went to work on the green colts daybreak Sunday morning, dressing in the half dark in clothes still wet from their washing them the night before and walking out to the potrero before the stars were down, eating a cold tortilla wrapped around a scoop of cold beans and no coffee and carrying their forty foot maguey catchropes coiled over their shoulders.

Tuck takes the turns off his saddle horn and makes that shaggy outlaw a gift of his prize catchrope.

He sat astride the bay horse, but now with a catchrope dallied to his saddle horn and a sleek buckskin filly side-wheeling in the cross-trail behind him.