John Fitzgerald GB 06 Return of Read Online Free

felt about the Academy as we walked home from the swimming hole with-Frankie.
    “I’m going to miss the good friends I made at the Jesuit Academy,” he said. “But when I think of how strict the Jesuit priests were, I thank my lucky stars I’m not going back.”
    “Well,” I said, “you had better keep your nose clean around here or Papa will send you back.”
    Tom seemed unconcerned. “With my great brain,” he said, “I’ll always be one step ahead of Papa and everybody else around here.”
     
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CHAPTER TWO
Tom and the Wild Jackass
    MONDAY MORNING Just a week before school was due to begin I went to Smith’s vacant lot with Tom and Frankie to play. We were surprised to see only one kid there. My friend Howard Kay came running to meet us with an excited look on his pumpkin face.
    “I waited for you,” he shouted.
    “Where are all the fellows?” Tom asked.
    “At Parley’s place,” Howard said. “His father brought home three wild mares and a wild jackass last night Mr. Benson is going to break the mares this morning.”
    Parley’s father was a wild animal bounty hunter. When-ever cattlemen and sheepmen began losing livestock to wild
     
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    animals they sent for Mr. Benson. He hunted down wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, and other wild animals that killed livestock. The ranchers paid him a bounty for each one he killed.
    He had never bothered to capture wild horses before the 1890s. Thousands of wild horses roamed throughout the west during the 1800s, but it cost more to capture and break them than they were worth. But with the beginning of the Boer War the British government sent agents to the western states looking for horses to ship to South Africa. A sound animal broken to the saddle brought as much as forty dollars. This caused a shortage of work horses, roping horses, cutting horses, riding horses, and brood mares among the ranchers. Mr. Benson sold the wild stallions and mares he caught to the ranchers after breaking them. Us kids always hoped Mr. Benson would bring back mustangs because they were the hardest of all wild horses to break. They lived up to their Spanish name, which means “running wild.”
    The Bensons lived just inside the town limits. They had a big barn and corral in back of their house with a pasture beyond. There were about twenty kids sitting on the log railing of the pasture fence when we arrived. The wild mares were running around in the pasture trying to find a way out. The wild jackass was standing in the middle of the pasture. He sure didn’t look wild to me. He looked as if he were asleep. He was a male which made him a Jackass. The female burro is called a jennet or a jenny. Mr. Benson’s big roan gelding, two pack mules, team of horses, and milk cow were grazing in the pasture not paying any attention to the wild mares or the jackass.
    We climbed up on the fence and sat by Parley. He was wearing his coonskin cap that he would never take off
     
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    outside unless he was about to go in swimming.
    Tom stared at the burro. “Why did your father capture a wild jackass?” he asked.
    “He didn’t capture him,” Parley said. “After Pa got the lead ropes on the three wild mares and started for home that jackass followed him. Pa reckons as how one of the mares could be his mate. The only way you get a mule is to breed a jackass to a horse mare.”
    “I know that,” Tom said as if his great brain had been insulted. “How old is the jackass?”
    “Pa figures about tour years old,” Parley answered.
    “What is your father going to do with him?” Tom asked.
    “He said I could have the jackass if I gentled him,” Parley said.
    “I know how you break a horse,” Tom said. “But how do you gentle a jackass?”
    “Same as a horse,” Parley said. “Pa says all I’ve got to do is ride him and break his spirit and prove I’m the boss. Then it will be easy to break him to pack saddle and harness.”
    “You’ve got one of the best saddle ponies in