them to the mark like a
good sergeant of raw militiamen.
Ump and his leaders had reached the open common by the ferry when the
long line stopped, and I saw Jud go to the front in a gallop. I waited
for the column to go on, but it did not, and I began to drive the cattle
in, bunching them up in the road.
Presently Jud came down into the turnpike and shouted to me. Then he
dismounted, tied the reins around the horn of the saddle, and started
the Cardinal to the rear. The trained cattle-horse knew very well what
he was to do, and picked his way through the steers until he reached me.
Then he turned in the road, and I left him to watch the drove while I
went to the front to see what the trouble was.
Both the Cardinal and the Bay Eagle were trained to this business and
guarded the rear of the drove like dogs. The rider might lounge under a
shade-tree, kicking up his heels to the sky. For this work El Mahdi was
a trifle too eccentric, and we did not trust him.
Jud was gone when I reached the little bank where the road turned into
the common of the ferry. I passed through the van of the cattle as they
stood idly on the sodded open swinging their long tails with comfortable
indifference. Then I came out where I could see the bank of the river
and the blue smoke trailing up from the chimney of the ferrymen.
Facing the north at the front door of this house, Ump sat on the Bay
Eagle, the reins down on the mare's neck and the hunchback's long hands
crossed and resting on the horn of his saddle.
The attitude of the man struck me with a great fear. About him lurked
the atmosphere of overwhelming defeat. The shadow of some mighty
disaster loomed over against the almost tragic figure of the motionless
hunchback sitting a horse of stone.
In such moments of strain the human mind has a mysterious capacity for
trifles. I noticed a wisp of dry sedge bloom clinging to the man's
shoulder,--a flimsy detail of the great picture.
The hunchback made no sign when I rode by him. What he had seen was
still there beyond him in the sun. I had eyes; I could see.
On a stone by the landing sat one of the ferrymen, Danel, his hands in
the pockets of his brown homespun coat. Neither Jud nor the other
brother was anywhere in sight. I looked up at the steel cable above the
man's head. It ended twenty feet away in the water.
I arose in the stirrups and searched the bank for the boat. It was gone.
The Valley River ran full, a quarter of a
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