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Show 116 In three or four hours I came to the place described, rounded up the cattle and waited. Eventually they rounded the turn of the dugway, both wagons, and the first day was half over. Due to the complications of getting away, though, we were far from half way to Three Creek. "How are you making out?" Papa asked me. "All right, " I told him. "Except for the calf. He is tired and sick. " "We'll take him on in the wagon, " he told me, and I was relieved, both for my sake and his, the calf's. He had developed an intense aversion to moving at all, and had to be beaten from behind every bush along the way, and I had developed an intense pity for him, both for the way I had to treat him, and for the loss of his mother. Papa put him on the hay brought along for the horses in the back of the wagon. "Go on into the ranch, " he told me. "Get a fire started and some hot water. " The wagons were soon left behind, out of sight, and I was on my own again, proud of Papa talking to me as if I were another man. This covered a woman's wild imagination, though, and a child's terror that something would happen-a wild beast, or a rough man encountered on the way. I met no man, but did come across a wild beast, of sorts. Going through Grass Valley, next over from Three Creek, a coyote came along beside me. He looked at me curiously, close as a dog, seemed to grin satanically as if to terrify me. When he didn't, he trotted along beside me, as if he were my dog. If he got ahead of me he sat on his haunches and waited, with his tongue lolling out. |