should want him to
sleep when he was not sleepy he had not yet discovered, and so disdained
to give it serious consideration.

"Not s'eepy," Buddy stated again emphatically as a sort of mental
dismissal of the command, and crawled carefully past Sister and lifted a
flap of the canvas cover. A button--the last button--popped off his pink
apron and the sleeves rumpled down over his hands. It felt all loose and
useless, so Buddy stopped long enough to pull the apron off and throw
it beside Sister before he crawled under the canvas flap and walked down
the spokes of a rear wheel. He did not mean to get in the way of the
wild cow, but he did want action for his restless legs. He thought that
if he went away from the wagon and the herd and played while they were
catching the wild cow, it would be just the same as if he took a nap.
Mother hadn't thought of it, or she might have suggested it.

So Buddy went away from the wagon and down into a shallow dry wash where
the wild cow would not come, and played. The first thing he saw was
a scorpion-nasty old bug that will bite hard-and he threw rocks at it
until it scuttled under a ledge out of sight. The next thing he saw that
interested him at all was a horned toad; a hawn-toe, he called it, after
Ezra's manner of speaking. Ezra had caught a hawntoe for him a few days
ago, but it had mysteriously disappeared out of the wagon. Buddy did
not connect his mother's lack of enthusiasm with the disappearance. Her
sympathy with his loss had seemed to him real, and he wanted another,
fully believing that in this also mother would be pleased. So he took
after this particular HAWN-toe, that crawled into various hiding places
only to be spied and routed out with small rocks and a sharp stick.

The dry wash remained shallow, and after a while Buddy, still in hot
pursuit of the horned toad, emerged upon the level where the herd had
passed. The wagon was nowhere in sight, but this did not disturb Buddy.
He was not lost. He knew perfectly that the brown cloud on his narrowed
horizon was the dust over the herd, and that the wagon was just behind,
because the wind that day was blowing from the southwest, and also
because the oxen did not walk as fast as the herd. In the distance he
saw the "Drag" moving lazily along after the dust-cloud, with barefooted
niggers driving the laggard cattle and singing dolefully as they walked.
Emphatically Buddy was not lost.

He wanted that particular horned toad,