ed to
come on endlessly. The leaders dropped in windrows, but the followers
leaped over them only to fall a little farther on.

Driven by the resistless impulse of these behind, the animals
unconsciously appeared like a charging regiment. Nearer and nearer the
tide approached the cowboys' defenses; but now it was coming more slowly
because of the dead bodies and the wounded animals that dragged themselves
here and there, bellowing with pain and terror.

At last, at the very mouths of the spitting guns the last of the steers
dropped, and the few that remained alive turned tail and fled wildly back
the way they had come. In front of the trenches was a horrible tangle of
trampled, wounded creatures, rearing as best they could and stabbing one
another with their long, sharp horns.

"Everybody out an' kill the ones that ain't dead!" yelled Bissell, and the
cowboys leaped over the breastworks on this hazardous errand of mercy.

"Where are the sheep?" was the question every man asked himself and his
neighbor, but no one could reply.

It had been reported to Bissell by the scouts that with the sheep were a
body of cattle. Consequently when the steers charged all had expected the
sheep to follow. But in all that grisly battle-field there was not a head
of mutton to be found, and the punchers looked at one another in mystified
wonder.

"They must be crossin' somewheres else," said Bissell, wringing his hands
in despair. "Oh, blast that man that stampeded them horses!"

The thought was in every man's mind, for here the beauty of that strategy
was made manifest. Uninjured, full of fight, and furious, the forces of
the cowmen were helpless because they had nothing to ride, and were
utterly useless on foot.

Two miles away on the bank of the river another scene was being enacted.

Here the eight thousand sheep had come to a halt with the leaders on the
very bank, and the herders walking back and forth talking to them to keep
them quiet. The river was not more deep than the height of a man, but the
current was swift and icy with the snows of the far-off Shoshone
Mountains.

"Are you ready, boys?" sang out Larkin.

"All ready."

"Strip and into it, then," and, the first to obey his own command, he
hurried off his clothes and plunged into the frigid river.

Sims, who had devised this scheme from memory of an Indian custom, stood
at the head of the leaders to superintend the crossing.

Now the men entered the water by te