She grabbed something from under her blanket and leaped away from Miss Cullam’s tent toward the stampede. Tom shouted to her to come back; Helen groaned aloud and seized the sleepy Jennie Stone.
“She’ll be killed!” declared Helen.
“What’s Ruth doing?” gasped the plump girl.
Then Ruth touched the trigger of the big tungsten lamp, and the spotlight shot the herd at about the middle of its advance wave. Snorting and plunging steers crowded away from the dazzling beam of light, brighter and more intense than the moon’s rays, and so divided and passed on either side of the tourists’ encampment.
The odor of the beasts and the dust they kicked up almost suffocated the girls, but they were unharmed. Nor did the ponies and burros escape with the frightened herd.
The racing punchers passed on either side of the camp, shouting their congratulations to the campers. The latter, however, enjoyed little further sleep that night.
“Such excitement!” murmured Miss Cullam, wrapped in her blanket and sitting before the fire that Pedro had built up again. “And I thought you said, Ruth Fielding, that this trip would probably be no more strenuous than a picnic on Bliss Island?”
But Min eyed the girl of the Red Mill with something like admiration. “Huh!” she muttered, “some of these Eastern tenderfoots are some good in a pinch after all.”
CHAPTER XI—AT HANDY GULCH
Sitting around a blanket spread for a tablecloth at sunrise and eating eggs and bacon with more flapjacks, the incidents of the night seemed less tangible, and certainly less perilous.