He was up the farther hillside and out of sight before the bull worked himself up to a charge. Then Calhoun suddenly remembered one of the items in the data about cattle he'd looked into just the other day. He felt himself grow pale.
"Murgatroyd!" he said sharply. "We've got to catch up! Fast! Stay with me if you can, but ..." He was jog-trotting as he spoke—"even if you get lost I have to hurry!"
He ran fifty paces and walked fifty paces. He ran fifty and walked fifty. He saw her, atop a rolling of the ground. She came to a full stop. He ran. He saw her turn to retrace her steps. He flung to the safety of the blast-rifle and let off a roaring blast at the ground for her to hear.
Suddenly she was fleeing desperately, toward him. He plunged on. She vanished down into a hollow. Horns appeared over the hillcrest she'd just left. Cattle appeared. Four—a dozen—fifteen—twenty. They moved ominously in her wake. He saw her again, running frantically over another upward swell of the prairie. He let off another blast to guide her. He ran on at top speed with Murgatroyd trailing anxiously behind. From time to time Murgatroyd called "Chee-chee-chee!" in frightened pleading not to be abandoned.
More cattle appeared against the horizon. Fifty or a hundred. They came after the first clump. The first-seen group of a bull and his harem were moving faster, now. The girl fled from them, but it is the instinct of beef-cattle on the open range—Calhoun had learned it only two days before—to charge any human they find on foot. A mounted man to their dim minds is a creature to be tolerated or fled from, but a human on foot is to be crushed and stamped and gored.
Those in the lead were definitely charging now, with heads bent low. The bull charged furiously with shut eyes, as bulls do, but the many-times-more-deadly cows charged with their eyes wide open and wickedly alert, and with a lumbering speed much greater than the girl could manage.
She came up over the last rise, chalky-white and gasping, her hair flying, in the last extremity of terror. The nearest of the pursuing cattle were within ten yards when Calhoun fired from twenty yards beyond. One creature bellowed as the blast-bolt struck. It went down and others crashed into it and swept over it, and more came on. The girl saw Calhoun, now, and ran toward him, panting, and he knelt very deliberately and began to check the charge by shooting the leading animals.
He did not succeed. There were more cattle following the first, and more and more behind them. It appeared that all the cattle on the plain joined in the blind and senseless charge. The thudding of hooves became a mutter and then a rumble and then a growl. Plunging, clumsy figures rushed past on either side. But horns and heads heaved up over the mound of animals Calhoun had shot. He shot them too. More and more cattle came pounding past the rampart of his victims, but always, it seemed, some elected to climb the heap of their dead and dying fellows, and Calhoun shot and shot.
But he split the herd. The foremost animals had been charging a sighted human enemy. Others had followed because it is the instinct of cattle to join their running fellows in whatever crazed urgency they feel. There was a dense, pounding, horrible mass of running bulls and cows and calves; bellowing, wailing, grunting, puffing, raising thick and impenetrable clouds of dust which had everything but galloping beasts going past on either side.