Yet, despite these discouragements, the foreman kept his temper and his head.
"Is there nothing we can do toward finding the boy?" asked Professor Zepplin anxiously.
"Does it look like it?" answered Stallings, motioning toward the fog that lay over them like a dull, gray, cheerless blanket.
Late in the afternoon Curley and Lumpy came straggling into camp with the remnants of the herd, with which they had raced out hours before. An hour afterwards, Big-foot Sanders drove in with a bunch of two hundred more.
"Where's the Pinto?" asked Stallings as Big-foot rode up to the trail wagon and reported.
"The Pinto? Why, I haven't seen the kid since the bunch started on the rampage last night. I thought he was with me on the other end of the herd. Hasn't he come in yet?"
"No."
"Then the kid's lost. All the cows back?"
"I don't know. I'll look over the herd and make an estimate. You come along with me."
Together the foreman and the big cowman rode out to the grazing ground, where they circled the great herd, glancing critically over them as they rode.