"Well, if they can't make the sheep wade over they can swim 'em, can't they?" asked Dick.
"'Tisn't so easy to make sheep swim," declared Yellin' Kid with a shake of his head. "Sheep are scary critters at best. You might get them in the water if you had a good leader, but if I was a sheep man—which I never hope to be—I'd think twice 'fore I'd float 'em across a stream, 'specially if it had quicksands in."
"Well, this has," affirmed Bud. "They come and go, the quicksands. They weren't here the other day but they're here now."
"Maybe they're going to ferry 'em across," suggested Nort.
"Where they going to get boats?" asked Snake, and that seemed to dispose of this question.
"Though maybe they carry collapsible craft," suggested Dick, but this, of course, was not reasonable or practical.
"No," said Bud, "they either know some way of getting the sheep over here, or else they aren't going to cross."
"They'll cross all right," asserted Snake. "Better let your father know how matters are," he suggested.
Bud went in to ring the home ranch up on the telephone, but he had no sooner given a few turns to the crank—for this was the old-style instrument—than he called out:
"Telephone wire is cut!"