"My God, a buffalo herd!" she exclaimed. Close at hand was a tall boulder in the shelter of which she instantly secured her horse; then running a few paces to where stood a tall, sturdy poplar, she clambered into its branches.
Then the tremendous mass, headed by maddened bulls, with blazing eyes and foaming nostrils, drove onward toward the south, like an unchained hurricane. Some of the terrified beasts ran against the trees, crushing horns and skull, and fell prone upon the plain to be trampled to jelly by the hundreds of thousands in rear. The tree upon which the girl had taken refuge received many a shock from a crazed bull; and it seemed to Annette from her perch in the branches, as if all the face of the plains was being hurled toward the south in the wildest turmoil. Hell itself let loose could present no such spectacle as this myriad mass of brute life sweeping over the lonely plain under the elfin light of the new-risen moon. Clouds of steam, wreathing themselves into spectral shapes rose from the dusky, writhing mass, and the flaming of myriad eyeballs in the gloom presented a picture more terrible than ever came into the imagination of the writer of the Inferno.
The spectacle, as observed by the girl some twenty feet from the ground, might be likened somewhat to a turbulent sea when a sturdy tide sets against the storm, and the mad waves tumble hither and thither, foiled and impelled, yet for all the confusion and obstruction moving in one direction with a sweep and a force that no power could chain.
Circling among and around the strange dusk clouds of steam that went up from the herd were scores of turkey buzzards, their obscene heads bent downward, their sodden eyes gleaming with expectancy. Well they knew that many a gorgeous feast awaited them wherever boulder, tree or swamp lay in the path of the mighty herd. At last the face of the prairie had ceased its surging; no lurid eye-ball light gleamed out of the dusk; and the tempest of cattle had passed, and went rolling out into the unbounded stretches of the dim, yellow plain.
When the ground was clear she descended from the tree, every limb trembling, lest in the delay the Indians should have accomplished their object. When she reached her horse, she found near by a heap of dead and struggling buffalo, which in their headlong race had run over the bluff front of the boulder. When she resumed her gallop she observed that the great amplitude of rich grasses was like unto a ploughed field. The herbage had been literally crushed into mire, and this the innumerable hoofs had churned up with the soft rich soil. The leguminous odors of the trodden clover and the rank masses of wild pease, together with the dank earthy smell of the broken sod, rose offensively in the girl's face. Her course now lay along an upland covered with straggling copses of white oak and poplar. In the dim valley beyond, lying drunken under the moonlight, was Hickory Bush. Upon the solid crest of the little hill the hoofs rang out sharply; but the girl's quick ear detected noises besides those which came from the trample of her horse. Still she swept on, with a long swing, resembling the flight of a swallow. A small grove lay in front, and as she swerved around this a horseman sprang suddenly before her.
"Stop!"
CHAPTER III.
THE LITTLE MAIDEN'S BRAVERY.
She pulled her rein, but her eye flashed and she grasped the butt of her pistol.
"Who dares call upon me to stop? Have I not the right of way on these prairies?"