ed the north bank of the Valley River,
the blazed face of the Polled-Angus leader came up out of the water at
his heels.

I rode out on the good hard ground, and turned the horse's head toward
the river. My heart sang and shouted under my shirt. The very joy of
what I saw seemed to fill my throat choking full. The black heads dotted
across the river might have been strung on a string. There were three
hundred cattle in that water.

Jud and the first fifty were creeping up the last arm of the mighty
curve, swimming together like brothers, the Cardinal sunk to his red
head, and the naked body of his rider glistening in the sun.

When they reached the bank below me, I could restrain my joy no longer.
I rose in the stirrups and whooped like the wildest savage that ever
scalped a settler. I think the devil's imps sleeping somewhere must have
heard that whooping.

CHAPTER XVI

THROUGH THE BIG WATER

Crowds of cattle, like mobs, are strangely subject to some sudden
impulse. Any seamy-faced old drover will illustrate this fact with
stories till midnight, telling how Alkire's cattle resting one morning
on Bald Knob suddenly threw up their heads and went crashing for a mile
through the underbrush; and how a line of Queen's steers charged on a
summer evening and swept out every fence in the Tygart's valley, without
a cause so far as the human eye could see and without a warning.

Three hundred cattle had crossed, swimming the track of the loop as
though they were fenced into it, and I judge there were a hundred in the
water, when the remainder of the drove on the south shore made a sudden
bolt for the river. The move was so swift and uniform, and the distance
to the water so short, that Ump and the ferrymen had barely time to
escape being swept in with the steers. The whole drove piled up in the
river and began to swim in a black mass toward the north shore. I saw
the Bay Eagle sweep down the bank and plunge into the river below the
cattle. I could hear Ump shouting, and could see the bay mare crowding
the lower line of the swimming cattle.

The very light went out of the sky. We forced our horses into the river
up to their shoulders, and waited. The cattle half-way across came out
all right, but when the mass of more than two hundred reached the loop
of the curve, they seemed to waver and crowd up in a bunch. I lost my
head and plunged El Mahdi into the river. "Come on," I shouted, and Jud
followed me.

If Sat