requently than would otherwise have been the case,
in order to keep the straying ones well rounded in.

The hours passed slowly, and with their passing Tad's appetite grew. He
sat on his pony, enviously watching the cattle filling their stomachs
with the wet grass.

"I almost wish I were a steer," declared Tad. "I could at least satisfy
my hunger."

Then the lad once more took up his weary round.

Off to the eastward, all was still excitement. The herd had broken up
into many parts during the stampede and the cowmen were having a hard
time in rounding up the scattered bunches.

A few of them had succeeded in working some of the animals back to the
bedding ground of the previous night, where the animals were left in
charge of one man.

With the coming of the morning and the fog, which blanketed everything,
their work became doubly difficult. The storm had wiped out almost all
traces of the trail made by the different herds in their escape, until
even an Indian would have been perplexed in an effort to follow them.

"Who is missing?" asked Stallings, riding into camp after a fruitless
search for his cattle.

"Tad Butler, for one," answered Walter Perkins.

"Let's see. He was on guard with Big-foot Sanders," mused the foreman.
"Big-foot has not shown up, so the young man probably is with him. No
need to worry about them. Big-foot knows this country like a book. You
can't lose him. Then there's Curley Adams and Lumpy Bates to come in
yet. I can see us eating our Thanksgiving dinner on the trail if this
thing keeps up much longer."

Yet, despite these discouragements, the foreman kept his temper and his
head.

"Is there nothing we can do toward finding the boy?" asked Professor
Zepplin anxiously.

"Does it look like it?" answered Stallings, motioning toward the fog
that lay over them like a dull, gray, cheerless blanket.

Late in the afternoon Curley and Lumpy came straggling into camp with
the remnants of the herd, with which they had raced out hours before. An
hour afterwards, Big-foot Sanders drove in with a bunch of two hundred
more.

"Where's the Pinto?" asked Stallings as Big-foot rode up to the trail
wagon and reported.

"The Pinto? Why, I haven't seen the kid since the bunch started on the
rampage last night. I thought he was with me on the other end of the
herd. Hasn't he come in yet?"

"No."

"Then the kid's lost. All the cows back?"

"I don't know. I'll look over the herd and make an estim