"You've got a good little mare there," he said; "there's not many of them could have done it. Tell me all about it some time. What started them?" he added, turning to the cattleman.
"That fool new bridge gave way just as the last of the bunch crowded on it. About twenty of them fell over the cliff there, and about thirty more along the road. But it might have been a heap worse, an' you ought ter have two life-savin' medals."
Merritt's only reply was a gesture of protest.
"An' you, youngster," went on the cattleman, "you kept your nerve and rode a bully ride. I wish you'd take my quirt and keep it from me as a remembrance of your first experience with a cattle stampede."
Wilbur stammered some words of thanks, but the foreman waved them aside.
"And now," said the Supervisor, with an entire change of tone, "I guess we'll go back and get the pack-horse and go on to the valley."
As they rode over the bridge Wilbur noted with a great deal of interest the breakage of the supporting timbers on the outer side, and looking down into the valley beneath, he could see the bodies of the cattle who had been pushed over the edge in the stampede.
"I read a story once," said the boy, "of a youngster who got caught in a stampede of buffalo, and when his horse lost his footing he escaped by jumping from the back of one buffalo to another until he reached the outside of the herd. But I never believed it much."
"It makes a good yarn," said the Supervisor, "an' it's a little like the story they tell of Buffalo Bill, who, trying to get away from a buffalo stampede, was thrown by his horse puttin' his foot in a badger hole and breaking his leg."
"Why, what in the world did he do?" queried Wilbur.