g carefully out from a thick
cluster of canes, having a respectful regard for their sharp thorns,
when, suddenly, the air was rent with a wild shriek, coming from the
direction of the grassy plot where I had left Ralph. Shriek after
shriek followed. I had heard those high piercing notes too many times
to be left in an instant's doubt; the shrieks were his. Tearing my way
out of the bushes, regardless now of thorns and scratches, I bounded
into the open. The scene that presented itself, when I could get a
view of what was going on, almost took away my breath. The entire
hillside, and the fields below, were literally swarming with cattle.
Not the tame domestic herds of peaceful Eastern meadows, but the wild,
long-horned, compactly built, active, and peculiarly vicious beasts
known in Western parlance as "range stock."

Ralph had been awakened, none too soon, perhaps by the trampling of
hoofs, perhaps by the low bellowing that I had absently attributed to
unseen thunder clouds. However it was, he had started up, as he
afterward sobbingly expressed it, "To make 'e bad tows do away, so 'ey
not hurt 'Essie."

In pursuance of this design he had advanced toward the foremost of
them, shouting and waving his big straw hat in one hand, while
attempting to wave my apron in the other. The apron was long and he
was short, and the effort to wave it in self-defense resulted in his
becoming wound up in it, falling, and rolling bodily down the
hillside, in the face of some half dozen wild-eyed steers, who were
coming up it. It was then that he screamed, and I appeared on the
scene at the very instant that one of the steers, awakening from what
appeared to be a momentary trance of surprise, advanced toward the
screaming little bundle, bellowing and pawing the ground. The immense
black head, crowned with a pair of great horns, curving like a Turkish
scimiter, and with a point as keen, was lowered; the savage animal was
on the very verge of charging on the helpless child, when my screams
drew his attention toward me. He paused, lifted his head, stared at
me, and, retreating a step or two, began pawing the ground again, at
the same time sending forth a hoarse challenge which seemed to
proclaim his readiness to engage me and all my race in a hand to horn
conflict if need be. His bit of bovine bravado had given me time to
reach Ralph. I caught him up and thrust him behind me. Clutching my
skirt tightly, he brought his scared little face into