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

wide horns and a huge head with eyes of green fire and a red tongue hanging out! Lucinda conceived the fearful idea that he would frighten the horse, charge the wagon, and perhaps gore the oxen into a stampede.
    This direful catastrophe failed to materialize. The oxen gained the woods, where the wide canvas top brushed the foliage on each side.
    Meanwhile the hours had been passing. Soon the character of the woods gave way to scaly ground covered with brush and scattered oaks, then a large oval open grey with sage, and centred in a depression which had at one time held water. Lucinda's quick eyes caught sight of a band of fleet, grey-rumped, graceful animals fleeing behind a coal-black leader.
    They flashed into the forest on the far side.
    Some time in the afternoon Logan passed her to the left, making a cut off across the sage. He was at full gallop in pursuit of some of his stock.
    He rounded them up and turned them back with the others. After a while, far in the distance, Lucinda espied an old cabin and a fence. Logan drew far ahead. She saw him drive his stock through the fence or around it.
    Lucinda was half an hour covering the intervening space. She needed all that time to recover her equanimity. But she need not have concerned herself about Logan. It transpired that at sunset, when she drove up to the old cabin, and yelled "Whoa!", she came upon Logan sitting on a log, grimy with dust and sweat, red as fire where he wiped the black off, and manifestly possessed by an elation that had just banished a very ignoble rage.
    "How'd you make it--when I wasn't close?" he asked. "Just fine. But that bull gave me a scare."
    "I reckon. I'll kill him yet. Of all the damn, ornery, muddleheaded beasts I ever had to do with--he's the worst... Wife, I worried myself sick about you, all for nothing."
    "Yes, you did," scoffed Lucinda, secretly pleased. She got off, with Coyote leaping down after her. The ground felt queer--or else her legs were insensible. "Where do we camp? And where's the water?"
    "Holbert said there's a spring behind the cabin. Reckon we'll camp right here."
    Lucinda untied the swinging buckets and with two of them started to hunt for water. Disillusion and weariness hung on her like wet blankets; nevertheless some feeling antagonistic to them worked upon her. A few plaintive flowers, primrose and dahlia, growing out of the weeds beside the cabin, eloquently told Lucinda that a woman had tended their parent roots there once upon a time. Perhaps a tenderfoot woman like herself!
    There was tragedy in the vacant, eye-like windows. She was crossing a level grassy place when Coyote sprang back with a bark. Bsszaz! A loud buzzing rattle sent Lucinda's nerves tingling.
    "That's a rattler. Look out!" shouted Logan, from behind. He came on a heavy run. "There! See him? A timber rattlesnake."
    Lucinda saw a thick snake, black and yellow, scaly and ugly, glide under the cabin. "That's all right," she said to the perturbed Logan. "I'm not afraid of snakes."
    "Well, don't go kicking one of those boys in the grass... Here's a trail."
    They discovered the clear, bubbling spring of cold water, which made the difference, Logan stated, between a good and a poor camp. On the way back Lucinda, peeping into the log-cabin, became virtually obsessed by wonder and dread. The littered earthen floor, the blackened fireplace, the rude shelves and the bedstead of poles, told a story that saddened and shocked her. What had happened there? How little Eastern people realized the crude living of those who set their faces West! Lucinda did not want Logan to find out how strongly she felt. She asked him if he had seen the beautiful black-horned animal leading the white and tan ones across the open.
    "Sure did. Golly, I wanted my rifle. That was a black antelope, king of that herd. Holbert has seen him for years."
    "Logan, you wouldn't kill him, would you?" she asked, gazing at him in horror.
    "Reckon I would. Wild animals sort of excite me. I like