The Hunters of the Ozark

by Edward Sylvester Ellis

"And didn't you hear any thing of the bell?"

"Do ye think that if I heard the bell I wouldn't have found the cow? Why was the bell put round her neck if it wasn't to guide friends? I listened many a time after it got dark, but niver a tinkle did I hear."

"That is queer," said Fred half to himself; "for, when no wind is blowing and it is calm, you can hear that bell a long ways; father has caught the sound in the woods, when the Brindle was all of a mile off. I wonder whether she could have lost the bell."

"I've thought of that, and said to meself that it might be also that she had become lost herself in trying to find it."

Fred laughed.

"She hardly knows enough for that; and, if she found the bell she wouldn't know what to do with it; but if that leathern string around her neck had broken, it may be that she is close by. A cow after losing one milking is apt to feel so uncomfortable that she hurries home to be relieved; but what's the use of talking?" added Fred, throwing up his head and stepping off at a more lively pace; "we've started out to find her and that's all we have to do."

Perhaps a dozen acres had been cleared around the little town of Greville. This had been planted with corn, potatoes and grain, though scores of unsightly stumps were left and interfered with the cultivation of the soil. Beyond this clearing or open space extended the immense forests which at one time covered almost the entire face of our country. On the south side of the town and distant a furlong wound a creek, which after many shiftings and turnings found its way into the Mississippi and so at last into the Gulf of Mexico. The course of this stream was so winding that it extended on two sides of the town and ran in a westerly direction, exactly the opposite of that it finally had to take in order to reach its outlet.

As a rule, it was about twenty feet wide with a depth of from one or two to six feet. It was subject to tremendous overflows which sometimes tripled its volume and increased its width to that of a river. At such times a series of enormous rocks through which the creek at "low tide" lazily wound its way, lashed the turbid current into a fury somewhat like that seen in the "whirlpool" below Niagara. Could you have stood on the shore and looked at the furiously struggling waters, you would have been sure that even if a man were headed up in a barrel, he could not have lived to pass through the hundred yards of rapids, though there was reason to believe that more than one Indian had shot them in his canoe.

Terry Clark told his friend that his search of the night before and of the morning following had been to the north and west of the settlement, so that it was hardly worth while to continue the hunt in that direction. The cows sometimes stood in the water, where so much switching of their tails was not needed to keep away the flies, and, though there was quite a growth of succulent grass on the clearing, the animals often crossed the creek and browsed through the woods and undergrowth on the other side.

The boys were inclined to think that the brindle had taken that course during the afternoon and had actually gone astray,—something which a quadruped is less likely to do than a biped, though the former will sometimes make the blunder. There was nothing unreasonable in the theory that the bell had fallen from her neck and that the owner therefore might be not far away.