ut the meaning of the Med Ship's
landing. Then she could identify herself as one of them and give them
the terribly necessary warning of Weald's suspicions.

"But," said Calhoun sourly, "if she's right, they'll have seen me
marching after her now, which spoils her scheme. And I'd like to help
it, but the way she's going is too dangerous!"

He went down into one of the hollows of the uneven plain. He saw a
clump of a dozen or so cattle a little distance away. The bull looked
up and snorted. The cows regarded him truculently. Their air was not
one of bovine tranquility.

He was up the farther hillside and out of sight 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 off 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 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 cows,
many times more deadly, charged with their eyes wide open and