“I’ve got her,” he shouted to Hugh, raising his arm high in signal of victory. “She’s—ouch!”
For a sharp report sounded from a thicket and a bullet, speeding just over Dick’s head, nipped his uplifted hand. Hugh, on coming up, found him applying his thumb to his mouth, as undisturbed as though he had scratched it with a pin. Poor Hulda still plunged and dragged at her halter, her sides heaving and her gentle eyes wide with fright.
“I was just coming up from the spring,” Dick recounted as between them they led the cow homeward, “when I heard Nicholas bark, so I ran around the corner of the cabin and there she was, just going over the hill a quarter of a mile away. At first I thought I could stop her alone, but when I saw the two Indians driving her, I ran back and signaled for you. Here, let’s lead her along the valley. I am out of breath chasing her up hills.”
“Aren’t you hurt?” inquired Hugh anxiously as they trudged along.
Hulda still made the going difficult, jerking and snorting with excitement. Her calm disposition, once completely roused, seemed almost impossible to soothe.
“Pshaw, no, the bullet hardly touched me,” Dick replied. “What surprises me is that they let us get her with only one shot fired. I don’t quite understand.”
“I wonder—” began Hugh, then paused, for a thought had struck him.
It struck him so deeply that he dropped Hulda’s rope and turned to run up the hill. There was a growing misgiving in his heart that turned swiftly to real terror as he sped along: it seemed as though he would never reach the summit. Yet even while he was struggling up the slopes he began to see a red glow behind the trees that seemed to grow brighter and brighter. In spite of a contrary wind there was a queer suffocating smell in the air.
“Dick, Dick,” he called, “leave Hulda; come quickly.”
The loss of forty cows could be nothing beside the disaster before him, as he reached the hilltop. Scarlet flames licked across the roof of Oscar’s cabin, with dense clouds of smoke rolling out toward the lake and with a single tall figure moving swiftly across the clearing, black against the brilliant blaze.