ght before the bull worked
himself up to a charge. Then Calhoun suddenly remembered one of the
items in the data about cattle he'd looked into just the other day. He
felt himself grow pale.

"Murgatroyd!" he said sharply. "We've got to catch up! Fast! Stay with
me if you can, but ..." He was jog-trotting as he spoke--"even if you
get lost I have to hurry!"

He ran fifty paces and walked fifty paces. He ran fifty and walked
fifty. He saw her, atop a rolling of the ground. She came to a full
stop. He ran. He saw her turn to retrace her steps. He flung to the
safety of the blast-rifle and let off a roaring blast at the ground for
her to hear.

Suddenly she was fleeing desperately, toward him. He plunged on. She
vanished down into a hollow. Horns appeared over the hillcrest she'd
just left. Cattle appeared. Four--a dozen--fifteen--twenty. They moved
ominously in her wake. He saw her again, running frantically over
another upward swell of the prairie. He let off another blast to guide
her. He ran on at top speed with Murgatroyd trailing anxiously behind.
From time to time Murgatroyd called "_Chee-chee-chee!_" in frightened
pleading not to be abandoned.

More cattle appeared against the horizon. Fifty or a hundred. They came
after the first clump. The first-seen group of a bull and his harem were
moving faster, now. The girl fled from them, but it is the instinct of
beef-cattle on the open range--Calhoun had learned it only two days
before--to charge any human they find on foot. A mounted man to their
dim minds is a creature to be tolerated or fled from, but a human on
foot is to be crushed and stamped and gored.

* * * * *

Those in the lead were definitely charging now, with heads bent low. The
bull charged furiously with shut eyes, as bulls do, but the
many-times-more-deadly cows charged with their eyes wide open and
wickedly alert, and with a lumbering speed much greater than the girl
could manage.

She came up over the last rise, chalky-white and gasping, her hair
flying, in the last extremity of terror. The nearest of the pursuing
cattle were within ten yards when Calhoun fired from twenty yards
beyond. One creature bellowed as the blast-bolt struck. It went down and
others crashed into it and swept over it, and more came on. The girl saw
Calhoun, now, and ran toward him, panting, and he knelt very
deliberately and began to check the charge by shooting the leading
animals.

He