loud that he would knock those grins so far in that they
would presently find themselves smiling wrong-side-out from the back of
their heads.

Pink, overhearing him, gave a last swat at the waggling tail of a
burrowing buck, and wheeled to overtake Irish and have a hand in
reversing the grins. Big Medicine saw them start, and came bellowing up
from the far side of the huddle like a bull challenging to combat from
across a meadow. Big Medicine did not know what it was all about, but he
scented battle, and that was sufficient. Cal Emmett and Weary, equally
ignorant of the cause, started at a lope toward the trouble center.

It began to look as if the whole Family was about to fall upon those
herders and rend them asunder with teeth and nails; so much so that
the herders jumped up and ran like scared cottontails toward the rim of
Denson coulee, a hundred yards or so to the west.

"Mamma! I wish we could make the sheep hit that gait and keep it,"
exclaimed Weary, with the first laugh they had heard from him that day.

While he was still laughing, there was a shot from the ridge toward
which they were running; the sharp, vicious crack of a rifle. The Happy
Family heard the whistling hum of the bullet, singing low over their
heads; quite low indeed; altogether too low to be funny. And they had
squandered all their ammunition on the prairie sod, to hurry a band of
sheep that flatly refused to hurry anywhere except under one another's
odorous, perspiring bodies.

From the edge of the coulee the rifle spoke again. A tiny geyser of
dust, spurting up from the ground ten feet to one side of Cal Emmett,
showed them all where the bullet struck.

"Get outa range, everybody!" yelled Weary, and set the example by
tilting his rowels against Glory's smooth hide, and heading eastward.
"I like to be accommodating, all right, but I draw the line on standing
around for a target while my neighbors practise shooting."

The Happy Family, having no other recourse, therefore retreated in haste
toward the eastern skyline. Bullets followed them, overtook them as
the shooter raised his sights for the increasing distance, and whined
harmlessly over their heads. All save one.

CHAPTER XIV. Happy Jack

Big Medicine, Irish and Pink, racing almost abreast, heard a scream
behind them and pulled up their horses with short, stiff-legged plunges.
A brown horse overtook them; a brown horse, with Happy Jack clinging to
the saddle-horn, his body sw