The cattle continued to move about and crop the short herbage. Few of them remained “bedded down.” In the distance another voice was raised in song. Ruth’s mount suddenly jumped to one side, snorting. A huge black steer rose up and blew a startled blast through his nostrils.
“Gracious! I thought that was a monster rising out of the very earth! And so did Freckles, I guess,” cried Ruth, with some nervousness. “Whoa, Freckles! Whoa, pretty!”
“You sing, too, Ruthie,” advised her friend. “We don’t want to start some foolish steer to running.”
The Eastern girl’s sweet voice—clear and strong—rang out at once and the two girls rode on their way. The movement of the herd showed that most of the cattle had got upon their feet; but there was no commotion.
As they rode around the great herd they occasionally passed a cowboy riding in the other direction, who hailed them usually with some witticism. But if Ruth chanced to be singing, they broke off their own refrains and applauded the girl’s effort.
Once a coyote began yapping on the hillside near at hand, as Ruth and Jane Ann rode. The latter jerked out the shiny gun that swung at her belt and fired twice in the direction of the brute’s challenge.
“That’ll scare him,” she explained. “They’re a nuisance at calving time.”
Slowly, but steadily, the cloud crept up the sky and snuffed out the light of the stars. The lightning, however, only played at intervals, with the thunder muttering hundreds of miles away, in the hills.
“It is going to rain, Nita,” declared Ruth, with conviction.
“Well, let’s put the rubber blankets over us, and be ready for it,” said the ranch girl, cheerfully. “We don’t want to go in now and have the boys laugh at us.”