The Tall Men (18 page)

As he went, all understanding of the Indian way, all allowances for its child-simple chivalry, left his heart. They were left in the grove with Clint. Underneath those rocks. In the torn shred of his poor hands, where the buzzards had been at them. In the grimace twisted onto his swollen face by the rupturing shaft of the broadhead arrow in his back.

In Ben Allison’s heart, as he raced the black back along the moondark miles of the Bozeman Road, there was only a great, aching emptiness; an emptiness closing slowly and for the last time around the lonely memory of Clint’s faraway smile and wild, soft laugh.

And in place of that heartsick emptiness, starting now to pulse through him with thick, soundless fury, an endless, cold anger began to grow.

Ben got into camp about ten o’clock. Stark, Waco, Chickasaw and Nella were waiting up for him. He told them briefly about Clint, said nothing about the buffalo skull or Crazy Horse. The peculiar light in his pale eyes forbade both sympathy and pointed inquiry, and by common, uneasy consent they let him do the talking. With his cold beans and bitter, reboiled coffee down, he turned to Stark.

“Time fer questions and answers,” he said bluntly. “How would
you
go about gittin’ three thousand cattle through Snow Mountain Medder and one thousand Sioux?”

Stark dropped his gaze, stared for a full minute into the fire.

In the big Montanan’s mind, many months, many miles, were turning swiftly. He thought of his blunder in seeking a western passage in the deserts of Utah. Of three horses roped together with Texas lariats, fighting out from behind an Arkansas riverbluff and into a high plains blizzard against his advice. Of his counsel to take the Sedalia Trail and of its following Jayhawk trap below the Kansas line. Of his insistence on driving north through Colorado, without turning back to Leavenworth and its Rolling Block rifles. Of his decision to let the Sioux have the stolen cattle below Fort Reno and his judgment, which had led to Curley’s death, in trying to wintercamp at Kearney. Of the lethal wisdom in his careless
leaving of the whiskey for Clint. And lastly he thought of the lean, darkfaced Texan crouched across the fire and waiting now.

Suddenly Nathan Stark was not so sure of himself. He had held his cards too close, and too long. The blanket was down, the chips all in the middle of it, right where he had wanted them all along. But with the next-to-last hand laid down and his turn to deal coming up, he knew he did not have the power to raise or call. Quietly, almost humbly, he passed.

“I’d ask Ben Allison,” he said.

Ben studied him, said nothing. He swung quickly on Chickasaw.

“Chickasaw?”

The old cattleman shifted his quid, drowned a fire-edge ember.

“I’d ask Mr. Stark to leave me know whut Ben Allison told him.”

“Waco?”

“I’ll play those.”

“All right,” said Ben.

He turned back to Stark.

“It’s fifteen mile through these hills inter the medder. Five across it. Four out the canyon on the fur side. Thet’s twenty-four mile.”

“At least,” nodded Stark.

“How does the land lay where she opens out of the canyon?”

“Fairly level and wide open. It’s a downhill drive all the way to the Yellowstone,” answered Stark.

“No more hills or narrer spots?”

“Not till just this side of the river.”

Ben’s eyes lit up. “How fur this side?”

“About a mile.”

“How’s she lay at thet spot? The road, I mean.”

“Passes between two ridges that funnel toward the river. Where the road leaves the ridges to open out into the Yellowstone bottoms, they’re no more than two hundred yards apart.”

“Thet’s the place then, by God.”

“For what, Ben? You’ve lost me again, man.”

“To let ’em hit us!”

“Good God, no! Once we’re in that funnel we’re worse off than we are here!”

“Not the way I figger it,” snapped Ben.

“How do
you
figger it?” drawled Chickasaw acidly.

“Happen you was a Sioux, Chickasaw,” said Ben, “how’d you work up a ambush in thet funnel?”

“W’al, lessee, now. Fust off, I’d bottle up the narrer end with about two thirds of my bucks laid up to jump us when we tried comin’ out fer the river. Then I reckon I’d take the other third and lay ’em up on this end of the funnel, split fifty-fifty ’twixt the two ridges. Thet’s so’s soon as we got the critters all inter the funnel they could jump our butts and drive us out the river-end and right inter the main bunch of their boys as was waitin’ there.”

“Chickasaw,” said Ben. “You ain’t all white.”

“Got a sixteenth Cherokee sum’ers on my daddy’s side,” drawled the weathered hand. “How’s she look to you Comanches?”

“I’ll let you know when we’re out of the other end of Four-Mile Canyon.”

“You mean ’if,’ don’t you?”

“I alius say whut I mean,” grunted Ben.

The little moment of lightness was gone now. The big Texan’s dark face was once more expressionless. He stood up.

“Waco, would you say the cattle was purty dry?”

“W’al, they ain’t drippin’. Last water we had was
Bush Crick, yestidday. They sure ain’t suckin’ none up off’n this goddam dead grass we got ’em on here. I’d say there’d best be good water and lots of it in thet medder of yers, yonder.”

“Ordinarily you’d say right,” muttered Ben.

“Whut you mean?”

“Thet there’s more water yonder than
six thousand
cattle could soak up all winter.”

“So?” scowled Chickasaw, breaking in.

“So,” replied Ben cryptically, “we ain’t goin’ to let the last calf tech a son of uh bitchin’ drop of it!”

“Gawd Amighty, boy! What you got in mind?”

“A night-drive. Right now, Round ’em up.”

“First light will ketch us in the medder, boy,” the old man objected.

“Iffen it does,” growled Ben, “we’re dead.”

“Meanin’?” It was Waco, again.

“We ain’t dead,”
said Ben.

“See here, Ben,” Stark broke in earnestly. “What
are
you getting at? I’m damned if I follow you.”

“You’re damned if you don’t!” rasped Ben.

“Good Lord, Ben, talk sense—!”

Ben nodded, cutting in on him, deep-voiced. “You’d best ketch-up yer longest legged wagonmules, Mr. Stark. Or you and yer precious freight wagons are goin’ to be a long time burnin’ in Snow Mountain Medder. We’re pullin’ out."

Ben’s camp breaking orders to the hurriedly rolledout cowboys, were chillingly short: either they got the herd out of Four-Mile Canyon by daybreak or they had wasted six months’ wages—not to mention a lot of long Texas hair which would look just dandy drying over a Sioux-lodge smokehole!

It meant making five more miles in six hours of
pitchdark than they had been able to make in the best ten-hour, daylight drive they had put behind them since leaving Fort Worth. It meant shoving three thousand cattle that were bone dry and bawling for water twenty-four miles before dawn. It meant putting them across a clear mountain stream of the best water in Montana on the way and not losing five minutes to let them drink doing it. And it meant, at last, in terms of Texas arithmetic simple enough for any bowlegged, Lone Star mathematician to tot up without his hardboiled trailboss’s help, averaging four miles an hour through cut up, narrow pass, new country, with a mile-long mill of pear-thicket longhorns that were already half wild for water and mean-hard to handle.

It was a Texas sized order.

By 2
A.M.,
hazing the tiring drag into the lush bowl of Snow Mountain Meadow, they had filled the first half of it.

Ahead lay Snow Mountain Creek and Four-Mile Canyon. Facing the prospect across the darkened meadow, Chickasaw cursed and spurred his panting gray up to Ben. “Goddam it, boy, we ain’t goin’ to quite cut ’er. The fresh-dropped calves and the nursin’ vealers are startin’ to straggle out and drop like flies off’n a stricknyne wolfbait. And them goddam lead steers are smellin’ crickwater and wantin’ to run. We cain’t hold ’em, boy. Whut’re we goin’ to do?”

“Let ’em run!” gritted Ben. Then, bellowing it into the darkness. “Tex! Tex Anderson—”

“Here!” The bearded cowboy drove his pony up through the boiling ground-dust. “How you want ’em headed, Ben?”

“Fast!” rapped Ben. “Me and Chickasaw and my point boys here will cut on ahead and git set over in
the mouth of the canyon. You and the rest of the boys git on the drag and shove the sons uh bitches fer the crick on the hightail. You got to pile ’em inter thet water so fast they cain’t stop, and not so fast we cain’t stop ’em on the fur side. You hear, boy?”

“Shove off!” shouted Tex. “I’m gone.”

Ben swung the black, yelling for Waco, Hogjaw, Slim and Charley Stringer to let the leaders go and to follow him and Cherokee “on the busted run.”

The six ponies bunched up, hammering down the road toward the midmeadow crossing. Behind them, the first steers were already hoisting their stiffened tails and rattling the ground with the dry clack of their excited trot. Ben led his riders across the stream on a digging run for the yawning canyon ahead. He split them three-and-three, he and Chickasaw and Waco taking the right wing, the others the left.

“Try and turn ’em in when they hit you!” he yelled across to Hogjaw. “We won’t be pickin’ our noses on this side.”

“I gotcha!” echoed Hogjaw.

“Fer Gawd’s sake,” roared old Chickasaw, “don’t nobody git in front of them!”

“Jest whut I had in mind!” hollered Hogjaw, acidly. “You goddam ol’ mossyhorn, who the hell you think you’re ridin’ with? The Fo’t Wuth Baptist Ladies Auxiliary?”

“Fork you!” yowled the old man, angrily. “I was ropin’ and th’owin’ rangebull-stuff when you wasn’t straddlin’ nothin’ wilder’n a wet bedsheet, you bantylegged leetle bastard!”

“Shet up and spread out!” yelled Ben. “Yonder they come.”

It went slick. Slicker than a man dared hope.

They got the leaders turned and chuted into the
canyon, and the main herd jamming in behind them, five minutes after the first steers blundered up through the dark. After that there wasn’t anything to it but to lay back and join the other boys in shouting and rope-whipping the drag in after them. By two-thirty the last stumbling heifer was on her way down Four-Mile Canyon, with the first hitch of Stark’s wagonmules hard on her lagging heels.

At four o’clock the first steer broke out of the canyon’s mouth onto the vast plateau of the Middle Yellowstone. By five, the last of Stark’s supply and freight wagons were a clean mile beyond the canyon wall. They had made it.

Ben, hanging back in a brushy water-cut with Chickasaw and Waco, watched the wagon train follow the herd over a distant swell of the plateau and drop out of sight toward the Yellowstone. He flicked his glance back to the sharpening silhouettes of the ridges buttressing the canyon exit behind them, waiting for what the coming daylight should show them along those ridges—
happen he had been right.

Ten minutes later the clearing wash of the daylight, filtering westward and around the backsides of the two Squaws, showed him and his silent companions a sight few white men have lain on their bellies in the brush to see; and lived to laugh about: hundreds and hundreds of Sioux horsemen, dot-small with the distance and the morning dimness, filing down out of the canyon’s flanking ridges, north and south, and streaming off to the west to disappear, within bare minutes and their own angry dust, beyond the bulge of the prairie.

“Ben,” said Chickasaw soberly, “yore eyes are younger’n mine. Whut you see along them yonder
ridges which them red bastards jest come down off’n?”

“Oldtimer,” murmured the tall Texan, “fur as I kin see, piled up there along them ridges, ten days deep, there ain’t nothin’ but hot Injun hoss manure.”

“Amen,” said Waco, rolling to his feet. “They shore frittered away a bad week waitin’ fer Little Ben Allison and his boys in Snow Mountain Medder.”

They went for their horses then. Chickasaw swung up last. He was still looking back toward the fading Sioux dust. When he turned to Ben, his eyecorners weren’t crinkling anymore.

“I allow I never thought you could do it, boy, bringin’ the herd through so far, so fast and ketchin’ them Sioux asleep like we done back yonder. They’s one thing troublin’ me, all the same. Ain’t we jest put it off by one more drive?”

“You mean the massacree, old hoss?”

Ben actually grinned it.

Old Chickasaw scowled, looked sharply at him. True, it was a nippy November morning, not all the frost being on the buffalo grass, and some little of it touching the corners of the big trailboss’s mouth. All the same, happen you had spent some years along the North Concho and could read Comanche sign, it was a grin.

“Sure funny, ain’t it,” Chickasaw growled irritably.

Ben kneed the black toward him, reached his hand and laid it on the bony old shoulder.

“Chickasaw,” he said, the grin disappearing but the frost not going with it, “happen old Ka-dih is still on my side, the joke’ll be on Crazy Hoss this time.” Then, quietly, as he turned the black to follow the wagons. “These happy little Oglala bastards ain’t
begun to learn how uncommon hard a Comanche kin laugh at suthin’ thet’s real funny—”

With the pause and the sudden ugliness in the words, he laughed. It was a short, bad sound, and Chickasaw exchanged narrow glances with Waco.

“Yeah, suthin’ thets
real
funny,” repeated Ben Allison slowly. “Like whut they done to Clint!”

They saw no more of the Sioux that morning, nor all of the long afternoon. Which proved nothing. The slope of the plateau toward the Yellowstone, despite Stark’s description of it as “wide open and fairly level,” was one of those pieces of high prairie which waves like an ocean. A flanking swell of low, eastwest ridges paralleled the trail for miles, and the Indians could have been moving their whole nation west and never shown a travois pony in the process. Adding to that discomfort, the ground cover of the plateau shortly turned to the matted, close curl of true buffalo grass and wouldn’t raise a decent dust if you drove a locomotive through it.

They did not dare attempt a noonhalt because of the condition of the cattle. It was all they could do to hold them on the trail and keep them moving. To have stopped and let them spread would have been to tempt the disaster of not being able to get them gathered and going ahead again. It was a ticklish piece of timing Ben was trying to achieve, too, anyway you look at it.

He knew, from Stark’s telling him, that the river was a scant ten miles from the outlet of Four-Mile Canyon. Normally, it would have meant about a three or four o’clock drive, but the plan that was turning in the big Texan’s mind demanded that they bring the herd into Stark’s “funnel” just at sunset.

The Indians had two favorite times of day for working on white men: early morning, late afternoon.

Their morning schedule had already been frustrated by Ben’s unprecedented, twenty-four-mile night drive. Now a man wanted to give them all the time they might feel they needed to get ahead of the herd and into their last chance positions behind the converging lines of the funnel ridges. At the same time, he wanted to hold his thirst-driven herd as long on the trail as he could. The plan also called for that, and in capital letters.

At two o’clock they sighted the winding, dark line of naked cottonwoods watermarking the distant Yellowstone. At the same time the wind, dead and waiting all day long, began to stir the two-inch curl of the buffalo grass—from the west, and from the river.

Feeling it fresh and clean on his sweating face, Ben shouted to the swing riders, stood in his stirrups and waved frantically to those following the drag.

With his signal, the cowboys swung their ponies wide of the staggering cattle, raced them forward. They could feel that river wind as quick as Ben, and read its meaning without his yell and wave. Even as they spurred their mounts to head the herd, the first steers were flinging up their heads, beginning to break into a stumbling trot.

In as many seconds as there were desperate riders ringing them, all the cattle were getting their caked noses up and following the leaders. Another two or three minutes and the whole herd would have been running, but Ben had moved in scant time. With all twenty-five fulltime riders in front of them, racing their mounts across the point and the forward shoulders of the swing, the run for the river was forestalled.

By four o’clock, with the Yellowstone but three miles ahead and the spreading wings of Stark’s funnel beginning in less than a mile, even Saleratus, his Mexican campboys, the night wrangler and Nathan Stark, himself, were cowboying with the best of them. And needing to. It was all, and maybe more than all, that they or any other thirty men could do to hold the bellowing cattle back.

Everything now depended on their ability to do so for the next forty-five minutes, or until they had every head deep into the funnel.

There was a thirty-first rider in that yelling, cursing, wild riding point those last endless minutes before the river. But she was not on the company payroll and didn’t count—except to Ben Allison and her other twenty-five big-hatted Texas worshippers.

If Ben and the men had thought the girl was something through the Red River rains, or the Platte Valley heat, or the six hundred miles of cowboy toil up the Sioux-ridden Bozeman, they hadn’t yet begun to know Nella Torneau.

“Goddam it, Ben!” yelled old Chickasaw, “git thet crazy gal back in the wagons ’fore she kills herse’f! She’s runnin’ in on them steers like she was out to bust a rodeo record or suthin’. Lookee there! Lookit thet, by Gawd! You see her run thet goddam paint mare of hers square inter thet dun steer was beginnin’ to run yonder? Jesus Christ! She knocked him plumb on his goddam butt. Git her out’n here!”

“He needed knockin’,” yelled Ben. “Leave her be. She’s wuth a roundup crew. Goddamit, she’s got all the boys ridin’ clean over their fool heads tryin’ to keep up with her and look good. Christ! You ever in yer life see sech a girl, Chickasaw!”

“Not in mine, nor nobody else’s!” bellowed the
old cowboy. “Watch it on yer right, boy!” he shouted suddenly “Thet roan bull, yonder!”

Ben spun the black, couldn’t head the big six-year-old herdbull that had broken past Waco and was running for the river. He flashed the .44, threw two shots from the hip into him, quartering away. The bull bawled piteously buck-jumped sideways, crashed into the dirt of the wagon road, his broken neck doubled under him. The point of steers following him out of the herd broke their starting run, split around his sprawling carcass, hesitated to sniff curiously at it. Waco and Hogjaw Bivins were in front of them then, their cutting horses moving like eight-hundred-pound cats. They got them bunched, hammered them back. The herd rumbled ahead, unbroken.

A short four hundred yards west now, the funnel narrowed for its slightly north-twisting exit into the Yellowstone bottoms. The bottoms themselves were hidden by the turn, though less than half a mile distant.

It was now or never.

Ben waved up Chickasaw and Waco. With the three lathered ponies held down to an excited, sidedancing lope, the incessantly bellowing cattle crowding up on their nervous rumps, the conversation of their tightjawed riders was necessarily succinct.

“You all clear on it now, boys?” said Ben.

“You ride ahead, up yonder ridge,” barked Waco. “If the Sioux are set and waitin’ like you reckon them to be, you wave three times. If they ain’t, you wave onct.”

“If we git the three waves,” growled Chickasaw, “meanin’ they’re out there ’twixt us and the river, ev’rybody pulls out from in front of the herd and toilers you up the ridge.”

“That’s it,” said Ben. “All set?”

“Cain’t wait,” shrugged Waco caustically. “I only hope yer second guess is better’n yer fust. Dammit, Ben! We ain’t seen hide nor hair on them Sioux you figgered would bottle our butts onct we had the hull outfit inter the funnel.”

“I reckon Waco’s got suthin’ there, boy,” old Chickasaw scowled. “She ain’t pannin out square on yer leetle skedjool so fur.”

Ben stood in his stirrups, looking quickly back across the herd. They saw his pale eyes narrow just ahead of the wolf-spread of the grin.

“Ain’t it?” he rasped, dropping back into the saddle. “Grab another look, boys. Tell me whut you see sproutin’ them ridge-tops back yonder.”

Waco and Chickasaw twisted around. They did not need to stand in their stirrups. The late sunlight was fresh and clean along the ridges behind them, and it was to their backs, not bothering the widening squint of their eyes in the least.

“They ain’t turkey feathers,” was the laconic way Waco chose to put it.

“Nor yet barnyard chicken,” agreed Chickasaw with equal prairie savoir faire. “I’d hazard they was mainly eagle,” if there was such a thing as a hurried Texas drawl, Chickasaw was hurrying one, “with mebbe a small hatch of hawk th’owed in fer the pure hell of it.”

For a “hazard,” the weathered Texan’s opinion was a pure-good guess.

Lining both ridgetops, motionless as so many red cameos against the slant of the late sun, were no less than three hundred mounted Sioux. And even as the three cowboys saw them and Ben was shouting the warning back to Hogjaw and Charley Stringer,
the hostile horsemen were sweeping down the ridges onto the level track of the Bozeman Road below.

The herd was sealed off. Right on schedule.

“I will see you boys in Sunday school,” said Ben Allison, and sent the black gelding in a cat-scramble up the ridge.

Minutes later he was atop the hills, seeing beyond him the sparkling, snow water sweep the Yellowstone. And seeing, on this side of it, what thirty-one Texas lives depended on. And on the long-odds chance of which he had gambled those lives.

As Chickasaw was wont to say in his moments of rare sentiment for his jockey-sized friend, Waco Fentriss, “There could be a leetle more of it, but it couldn’t be put together no better.”

Crazy Horse could not have lined his braves up any more perfectly if he had consulted Ben beforehand.

There were maybe six hundred of them between the tunneling outlet of the Bozeman Road and the river. The Sioux chief had them spread in a quarter-mile semicircle, his center based on the road, his flanks cupping toward the ridge upon which Ben sat the gelding. And had Ben been able to understand Sioux, and Crazy Horse’s voice been equal to spanning the distance between them, the Sioux leader could not have shouted his intentions any more clearly.

Tashunka Witko knew he had all the red power in that part of Montana either mounted up behind him or presently closing off the herd’s rear. He knew the Ride-A-Heaps had no chance at all this time. And that he could afford the luxury of hitting them head-on, to finish it once and for all in real north plains style. He knew why he had trailed them four hundred miles,
and he knew why it wasn’t going to be necessary to trail them another four hundred yards.

When the army had started its string of forts across the Powder River Treaty Land, Crazy Horse had known what it meant to him and to his people: the coming of the settler, the killing off of the buffalo, the end of the Indian. He had known then, as he knew now, what he had to do about that and what he would do about it. The Sioux had to close the Bozeman Road for all time. He knew that they had had it closed, too, until these cursed Ride-A-Heaps and their badsmelling spotted buffalo had dared what the entire United States Army had not—to break it wide open again, Sioux or no Sioux.

He knew, finally, when word came to him in the war-camp on the Tongue, that the Texas cowboys had pushed their great herd past Fort Kearney in the dead of night, that Wakan Tonka, the Sioux Great Spirit, had touched him, Tashunka Witko, upon the shoulder.

And he knew that Crazy Horse was chosen from among all his people to strike these invaders into the bloody dirt of the Bozeman, to show their craven white brothers what the Dakota People meant when they made their sacred mark on a treaty paper, and to close the Thieves Road forever.

Indeed, Tashunka Witko knew many things. In all his lonely, skyswept empire there were perhaps but two small things he did not know.

Ben Allison for one.

And the way of three thousand thirst-crazed Texas longhorns with whatever might stand between them and their first water in seventy-two hours, for another.

In the last minute, Crazy Horse saw Ben on the ridge. The Sioux chief’s eyes were as good as any cowboy’s. His memory maybe even better.

He knew Ben at once.

He jumped his piebald roan stallion out into the open road, fifty yards ahead of his warriors. He slid him on his hocks, reared him up in a forehoof-lashing stand. He held his rifle high above his head in both hands, shaking it at Ben. His deep-throated Oglala shout rolled across the open ground and up the ridge.
“Tshaoh! Tshaoh!”
Then, up-ending the rifle, he fired four shots into the air, spun the wiry little stallion back towards his waiting braves.

Ben’s mouth twisted.

The rifle, held up in both hands, meant the chief was letting him know he had Big War on his mind. The four shots meant he was enlisting, after his devout fashion, Wakan Tonka’s blessing in the bloody matter. Four, Pawnee Perez had told Ben at Fort Kearney, was the Sioux Good Medicine number. When they used it on you, you were to look out right sharp, for it meant they figured they had you where your hair was short and you couldn’t get loose without leaving your scalp.

Perez had also told him another number. One the Sioux hated. Five. A very big number. Very bad medicine number. By a heap the worst they knew how to count to.

Ben flung up his Henry, both hands high with it. Then he dropped its buttplate to his hip, levered the five shots into the clouding sunset overhead.

With that, he was standing in his stirrups, black hat in hand, checking for the last time the bawling mill of the vast herd below and behind him.

The cattle were crazy now. They were piling and jamming into the thin line of riders fronting them, their swollen tongues lolling, their alkali-crusted eyes rolling wildly. They were riding the rumps of the steers fronting them, goring right and left with their four-foot horns, crushing down their weaker fellows, driving them underfoot, bellowing in a cracked and hideous bawl their wildness for the water they could smell but not see.

“Let ’em go I” screamed Ben. And flagged the black hat three times across the cloud-red stain of the five o’clock sky.

A Texas longhorn can run like a deer, rage like a lion, and fears a man on horseback no more than does a Spanish fighting bull. Three thousand of them, broken out of a two hundred-yard-wide unloading chute in wildeyed, full stampede, insane for water and with nothing between them and that water but a few hundred mounted Indians, is a sight no man forgets.

To Ben and his cheering, rebel yelling cowboys crowding the ridgetop above, it was the finest sight Texas eyes ever beheld.

For certain of the stunned Sioux, to an exact number never really determined, it was the last, worst sight the human eye can hold—the sudden fearful exposure on widened retina, of the skull-grinning picture of coming death.

The distance from the funnel mouth to the river, was no more than four hundred yards. The Sioux had their ambush line set midway. They had only time to look down the hoarsely-lowing throats of the maddened lead steers, and to jam their ponies into a milling tangle of attempted escape, when the following main wave of the stampede struck them.

The Indian ponies, unbroken to the strange smell of the white man’s cattle and to the foreign thunder of their harsh bellowing, went crazy.