CHAPTER X
WAR WITHOUT QUARTER
He found her where he had left her, but now she was standing and looking out over the silent prairies, as though searching for someone.
“What are you trying to see?” Bud asked.
“I thought father and some of the cowboys would probably follow the sheep once they had started them. Oh, what have I said?”
“I imagined it was they who had done it,” said Bud quietly, the full enormity of the thing not yet having sunk deep into his mind. “How did you get mixed up in it?”
“Simply enough,” replied Julie. “Late in the afternoon Chuck, one of the men on the eastern range, came riding in and said that your sheep were directly east of the ranch house. Father and Mike Stelton talked a lot about it at supper, and figured up then that the easiest way—well, to teach you a lesson, they called it—was to run them over the bank of the Little River.
“I don’t like sheep, Bud, as you know; but that was going too far for me, and I protested, with 115 the result that father took Mike outside with him, quite upset that I said anything at all. Both of them looked black as a silk hat.”
“Good little girl!” cried Bud gratefully, and she turned her face directly toward him and smiled; just such a smile, Larkin remembered, as he had seen her use on other soft nights years before, in circumstances so totally different.
“After supper,” she continued, “there was a great bustle of getting away, and I grew curious to see what they would do and how. So as soon as they left I saddled my calico and set out after them, keeping about abreast but a couple of miles to the north. The next thing I heard was a terrific lot of shooting and yelling, and the business was done. I don’t wonder the sheep were in a panic!