The steer quite forgot the man behind, until he made a vicious lunge and was checked by the rope that had hung slack and unnoticed over his back.

Furious, the steer turned and charged resentfully at the caballero who was following him and shouting taunts.
But there again he was checked by the first.
So, charging this way and that; galloping wildly in pursuit of the man who seemed to be fleeing for his life, or wheeling to do battle with the rider who kept just so far in his rear, he was decoyed to the very outskirts of the camp.
If he had been qualified to weigh motives, the heart that brindle-roan steer would surely have burst at; the pure effrontery of the thing: not only must he yield his life and give his body for meat, that those yearning stomachs might be filled with his flesh; he must deliver that meat at the most convenient spot, as a butcher brings our chops to the kitchen door.

For that purpose alone they were cunningly luring him closer and closer, that they need not carry the meat far when they had slaughtered him.
At least his last moments were lighted with hope.

He made one grand, final dash, tripped in a noose that had somehow dropped neatly in the way of his front feet, and went down with a crash and a bellow of dismay.

Some one ran lightly in--he did not see that it was the vaquero he had been pursuing all this time--and drove a dagger into the brain just back of the horns.