"I'm going to run and tell John Winsome—right now I am!" shouted Tad, and he turned around and ran back along the road they had come just as fast as he could run.
But Russ stayed where he was. His lips were still puckered in a whistle and he was thinking hard.
"What can we do for the poor calf, Russ?" asked Rose.
She seemed to think that her brother would think up some way of helping the mired creature. No knowing how long Tad would be in finding the owner, and it looked as though the calf was sinking all the time.
Russ Bunker had quite an inventive mind. The other children were helpless in this emergency, but he began to see how he could help the calf stuck in the muddy swamp. He ran to the roadside fence, which was a good deal broken down just at the edge of the open swamp lands. The fence rails were so old and dry that Russ could pull them, one at a time, away from the posts. He dragged the first one to the spot where the calf was blatting so pitifully. Although these cedar rails had been split out of logs many years before, they were still very strong.
"Come on, Rose! You can help drag these rails too," cried Russ, quite excited by the thought that he might be able to save the calf before Tad Munson brought help.
"Oh! what are you going to do? Are you going to burn that poor calf like the Indians used to burn folks?" asked Vi, who remembered something she had heard at Uncle Fred's ranch. "You going to burn the calf at the stake?"
This was a horrifying thought, but even Laddie, who was very tender-hearted, was too much excited to think of this. He said to his twin sister:
"How silly, Vi! You couldn't burn those old rails on that wet place. The fire would go right out."
"Russ won't burn it, or let it drown either," Margy said, with much confidence in their older brother.