imself
wedged in behind a barricade of bellowing cattle, whose flying hoofs
made him hastily burrow deeper into the decayed log.

This obstruction soon caused the main body to swerve. Their solid front
had been broken at last, yet they continued on as wildly as before,
bellowing and horning one another in their mad flight.

The rain, which had held back during the brilliant electrical display,
now came down in drenching torrents, packing down the sand of the plain
which the wind, before, had picked up and tossed into the air in dense
clouds.

Tad was soaked to the skin almost instantly. But he did not mind this.
His thought, now, was to get out of his perilous position and follow the
herd.

The cattle that had fallen so near him, were now one by one extricating
themselves from their predicament, each one giving vent to a bellow as
it did so and dashing after its companions.

The lad was not slow to crawl from his hiding place the moment he
considered it safe to do so. As it was, he got away before the snarl of
steers had entirely unraveled itself.

What to do Tad did not know. His pony gone, and, with no sense of
direction left, he was in sore straits.

"I'll follow the cattle," he decided. "Besides, it's my business to stay
with them if I can. I'll do it as long as I've got a leg to stand on,"
he declared, cautiously working around those of the cattle that were
leaping from the heap and running away.

The mesquite was still full of stragglers dashing wildly here and there.
In the darkness, the boy was really in great danger. There were no large
trees behind which he could dodge to get out of the way of the animals
as they rushed toward him, nor was he able to see them when they did get
near him. He was obliged to judge of their direction by sound alone.
This was made doubly difficult since the rain had begun to fall, for
now, young Butler could scarcely distinguish one sound from another.

Once a plunging steer hit the lad a glancing blow with its great side,
hurling him into a thicket of bristling mesquite. The thorns gashed his
face and body, almost stripping the remnants of his tattered clothes
from him.

Still, with indomitable pluck, the lad sprang to his feet, stubbornly
working his way through the thicket.

He came out finally on the other side and floundering about for a time,
found himself once more on a plain, which he had observed in the light
from a flash of lightning extended away indefinitel