30,000 On the Hoof by Zane Grey Read Free Book Online Page A

away with the wagon creaking. "Gee! gee!" They turned into the main road. "Now, Luce, it's all plain sailing, without a turn-off for fifteen miles--to the old homestead. We've got to make it before dark... Put on your gloves... Gosh! if we make it with all my stock--one brindle bull, a mean cuss, eight cows, six two-year-old steers, and five heifers--oh! I'll feel rich. But I'll have to ride some."
    With outward composure Lucinda took the whip he tendered her, and averted her face. Was the man stark mad to set her this task? Or was he paying her the tribute due the women of the Oregon Trail? She chose not to let him guess her perturbation. Logan leaped off while the wagon was moving.
    "Good luck, old girl!" he called, happily. "If this isn't great? Luce Huett, ox-driver of the Arizona range! Whoopee!"
    Lucinda failed completely to share his enthusiasm, although she was glad to find that a really momentous occasion could pierce his practicality.
    She was left alone on that high driver's seat, too high to leap off without risking life and limb. Coyote regarded her with intelligent eyes, as if she understood Lucinda's predicament. Lucinda held the whip with nerveless hand. The wagging beasts plodded on unmindful of her tightly oppressed breast and staring dyes. Ahead the road followed the lake-shore for miles, as far as she could see. Her ponderous steeds could not turn to the left; but supposed they turned to the right? The wagon and she, with her trunks of pretty clothes and her chest full of even more precious and perishable belongings, and Logan's utensils and supplies for his great enterprise--these must all go toppling down into the lake. But while Lucinda watched with uncertain breath the oxen travelled along, slowly and steadily, ponderously, as they had done the day before.
    Probably they were not even aware that a woman-driver now held the whip.
    Lucinda hugged that comforting thought to her heart. She determined not to yell "Gee," "Haw," or "Whoa" until necessity compelled it; and gradually her fears subsided. She could look at the slope and out upon the lake, and far ahead with a growing sense of something beside the risk of the situation. She was doing an unprecedented thing: driving a prairie-schooner drawn by oxen! Here was an amazing fact that should have indulged her primitive side to the full. But that part of her seemed in abeyance.
    "I had an idea school-teaching was hard," she soliloquized. "But this pioneer game!... Oh, I do love Logan!"
    The sun came up glaringly hot. Lucinda removed her heavy coat. When she looked back she thought she saw the dust-obscured cattle running the other way, and before she realized disloyalty to Logan, she hoped they were.
    The time came, however, when she realized her mistake. A breeze from behind brought a smell of dust, then the sound of hoofs. Peering back, Lucinda saw that Logan's stock was not far behind. Then through the dust she espied him, and on the moment he appeared to be throwing stones with a violence that suggested impotent fury. Lucinda had it in her to laugh.
    "Serves him right-'the cowboy cattleman husband who does not have time even for a honeymoon!"
    Almost before she realized it she had reached the end of the lake, where the road turned across a bare flat to enter the forest. The oxen apparently saw nothing save the road, and they kept on it, oblivious of the cattle behind. Lucinda also made the surprising discovery that the sun stood nearly overhead. She was hot and thirsty, and she could not find the canteen that Logan had stuck somewhere under the seat.
    As the wagon rolled around a bend in the road Lucinda looked back. The cattle were strung out. On the moment Logan was chasing some wild heifers that had swerved far off the course. The cows looked dusty and tired.
    Then Lucinda saw the bull. In fact, he bellowed on the instant. She had to see him. So close behind that he had driven the haltered horse right on the wheels of the wagon! A dusty beast with