Page:Ruth Fielding at Silver Ranch.djvu/143

Rh strange, bustling movement of the whole mass, rose up to the excited spectators in a great wave of sound and color. It was a wonderful sight!

Jib rode up the hill to meet them. The men on duty were either squatting here and there over the range, in little groups, playing cards and smoking, or riding slowly around the outskirts of the herd. There was a chuck-tent and two sleeping tents parked by the river side, and the smoke from the cook's sheet-iron stove rose in a thin spiral of blue vapor toward that vaster blue that arched the complete scene.

"What a picture!' Ruth said to her chum. "The mountains are grand. That canon we visited was wonderful. The great, rolling plains dwarf anything in the line of landscape that we ever saw back East. But this caps all the sights we have seen yet."

"I'm almost afraid of the cattle, Ruthie," declared Helen. "So many tossing horns! So many great, nervous, moving bodies! Suppose they should start this way—run us down and stamp us into the earth? Oh! they could do it easily."

"I don't feel that fear of them," returned the girl from the Red Mill. "I mean to ride all around the herd to-night with Nita. She says she is going to help ride herd, and I am going with her."

This declaration, however, came near not being