his forehead, absently. Striding to
the door, he flung it wide open.

"Hell!" he muttered in complex apostrophe.

To put on hat and top-coat was the act of a moment. To release the
tethered pony the work of another; then swift as a great brown shadow,
out across the whitening prairie to the spot he remembered last to
have seen the herd, the delinquent urged the willing broncho--only to
find emptiness; not even the suggestion of a trail.

Back and forth, through miles and miles of country, in semi-circles
ever widening, through a storm ever increasing and with daylight
steadily diminishing, Calmar Bye searched doggedly for the departed
herd; searched until at last even he, ignorant of the supreme terrors
of a South Dakota blizzard, dared not remain out longer.

That he found his way back to the ranch yard was almost a miracle. As
it was, groping at last in utter darkness, blinded by a sleet which
cut like dull knives, and buffeted by a wind like a hurricane, more
dead than alive he stumbled upon the home shanty and opening the door
drew the weary broncho in after him. Man and beast were brothers on
such a night.

Of the hours which followed, of moaning wind and drifting sleet,
nature kindly gave him oblivion. Dead tired, he slept. And morning,
crisp, smiling, cloudless, was about him when he awoke.

Rising, and scarcely stopping for a lunch, the man again sallied forth
upon his search, wading through drifts blown almost firm enough to
bear the pony's weight and alternate spots wind-swept bare as a floor;
while all about, gorgeous as multiple rainbows, flashed mocking bright
the shifting sparkle from innumerable frost crystals.

All the morning he searched, farther and farther away, until the
country grew rougher and he was full ten miles from home. At last,
stopping upon a small hill to reconnoitre, the searcher heard far in
the distance a sound he recognized and which sent his cheek pale--the
faint dying wail of a wounded steer. It came from a deep draw between
two low hills, one cut into a steep ravine by converged floods and
hidden by the tall surrounding weeds. Bye knew the place well and the
significance of the sound he heard. In a cattle country, after a
sudden blizzard, it could have but one meaning, and that the terror of
all time to animals wild or domestic--the end of a stampede.

Only too soon thereafter the searcher found his herd. Upon the
brow of a hill overlooking the ravine he stopped. Below him,