e moving about in the corn. They looked and, from their
vantage-point, made out a big herd. Their shout brought their mother
hurrying into the yard.

"They're not ours, are they?" she asked. But the big brothers were
bringing the wagon team and a cultivator horse out of the barn,
unsaddled and unbridled, and did not hear. Before she could reach them,
they had dashed off.

She stood looking after them, her apron over her head. She knew that if
the cattle in the field belonged to the farm, something had gone wrong
with the little girl; and she strained her eyes anxiously to where loud
bellows, shouts, and the cracking of cattle-gads told that the herd was
being routed.

Suddenly, from across the intervening corn and sorghum and into the
cottonwood break, crashed a great white bull, whose curly head was
swaying angrily and whose eyes shone with the lust of fight, while
behind, laying about him with a whip at every jump, came the biggest
brother. It was Napoleon.

"Oh, my poor pet lamb!" cried the little girl's mother, and retreated
into the smoke-house for safety as the bull and his pursuer came by.

It took hard riding to rid the grain of the cattle, for, under cover of
the dusk, they slipped back into the wheat again and again after having
been driven out. So it was long after supper-time before the herd was
bunched and driven around the farm to the reservation road and into the
wire pen by way of the ash lane in front of the house. Then the big
brothers came tramping into the kitchen, tired and hungry.

But what was their surprise to find it empty. And, on looking about,
they discovered a note from their mother. It had been put in plain sight
against the syrup-jug and read:

"_The dogs, all except Luffree, came home. If she has returned when you
read this, fire a musket._"

They stood in a circle and looked blankly at one another. For it had not
crossed their minds that the little girl was not home, but somewhere out
on the prairie, tied to a pinto, and all alone in the dark.

Without waiting to snatch a bite from the table, they started off to
search, leaving their jaded horses in the barn. The eldest brother went
straight for the river, which he meant to follow, and took a musket
with him; the youngest ran off up the path between the corn and the
wheat, and carried the cow-horn; while the biggest made for the
carnelian bluff, taking neither gun nor horn, but relying on his lungs
to carry any good news to th