Page:Cather--One of ours.djvu/152

138 “You don’t say so! It can’t be anything bad, or they’d let me know.”

“Oh, it’s nothing very bad, I guess, but he got his face scratched up in the wire quite a little. It was the queerest thing I ever saw. He was out with the team of mules and a heavy plough, working the road in that deep cut between their place and mine. The gasoline motor-truck came along, making more noise than usual, maybe. But those mules know a motor truck, and what they did was pure cussedness. They begun to rear and plunge in that deep cut. I was working my corn over in the field and shouted to the gasoline man to stop, but he didn’t hear me. Claude jumped for the critters’ heads and got ’em by the bits, but by that time he was all tangled up in the lines. Those damned mules lifted him off his feet and started to run. Down the draw and up the bank and across the fields they went, with that big plough-blade jumping three or four feet in the air every clip. I was sure it would cut one of the mules open, or go clean through Claude. It would have got him, too, if he hadn’t kept his hold on the bits. They carried him right along, swinging in the air, and finally ran him into the barb-wire fence and cut his face and neck up.”

“My goodness! Did he get cut bad?”

“No, not very, but yesterday morning he was out cultivating corn, all stuck up with court plaster. I knew that was a fool thing to do; a wire cut’s nasty if you get overheated out in the dust. But you can’t tell a Wheeler anything. Now they say his face has swelled and is hurting him terrible, and he’s gone to town to see the doctor. You’d better go over there tonight, and see if you can make him take care of himself.”

Leonard drove on, and Ernest went back to his team. “It’s queer about that boy,” he was thinking. “He’s big and strong,