With starting eyes she saw the swirling currents draw Sassy, maelstromlike, in and in. The hen lost her feet, was next tossed like a white ball hither and thither, and then sped out of sight into the vortex of the storm's wild mingling of matter, taking with her all the little girl's hopes of future revenue—the unlaid eggs and the unhatched chicks. As she disappeared, she gave a final frightened, crowing cluck. It was her swan song.
When the tornado had swept on, leaving in its wake a wide path of bare ground fringed with wreckage, the little girl hurried home to assure herself that her mother and the big brothers had gotten into the storm-cellar, and that the blue mare was unhurt, and to gaze into the sitting-room mirror to see if her hair had turned white. Satisfied upon all points, she changed her clothes and started eastward on horseback, following the streaked road of the cyclone. As she traveled, she kept steadfastly on the lookout, and jogged along until the prairie was wrapped in night. When, at last, she turned and started back, she carried, as trophies of her search, her mother's wooden chopping-bowl, dusty and unharmed, and, thrust in her hat-band, a solitary memento of the vanished crowing hen, a broken, soiled white feather.
XVI
THE RESERVATION TRIP
A HUGE pen with V-shaped wings, patterned after those built by the Indians to imprison antelope, thrust its long, high neck over the railroad embankment and against the open doors of the cattle-cars as they were rolled along the siding. Through the pen and up the jutting neck into the stifling, wheeled boxes, lowing in fright and advancing unwillingly, were driven the Dutchman's fat steers and the beeves belonging to the cattleman. When a long train was filled with them, a wildcat engine backed down from the station, coupled on to the waiting freight, and went lumbering away with its hungry, thirsty load, bound for a packing-house in a distant city.
The little girl watched the shipping of the stock, her heart sore with the thought that only a short week stood between the home herd and the shambles. Never before had she mourned the departure of the cattle, for, spared the long ride in foul, torturing confinement, they had simply disappeared across the prairie in the direction of Sioux Falls or Yankton, contentedly feeding as they went, and with the three big brothers riding slowly behind them. It had always been the same with the sheep. But now there rang continually in her ears the piteous bleating of the little flock she had learned to love through the summer months, and that, lured by a treacherous bell-wether, had passed through the pen, some days before, and crossed the long, high Bridge of Sighs.
But what she feared for the animals yet to be sold never came to pass. The morning before the big brothers were to round-up, a trooper rode in from the reservation with an urgent message from the new commandant, asking that as many head of beeves as possible be sent to the post. The letter stated that a stock-raiser, with whom negotiations had been all but closed, had received an offer from a Kansas City buyer that advanced the army terms by a fraction of a cent per pound on the hoof. The commissary, therefore, was compelled to look elsewhere for meat.