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It is, perhaps, easier to haze and hammer bewildered Hindus and Tamils, as is being done across the Border, than to stampede the men of the Yalu and Liaoyang. But when one began to ask questions one got lost in a maze of hints, reservations, and orations, mostly delivered with constraint, as though the talkers were saying a piece learned by heart. Here are some samples:
For the Americans are in some ways a very self-conscious people. To compare their social enthusiasm to a stampede of cattle is to ask us to believe in a bull writing a diary or a cow looking in a looking-glass. Intensely sensitive by their very vitality, they are certainly conscious of criticism and not merely of a blind and brutal appetite.
The rush had passed on, across the Sink to Blackwater and to the gulches in the mountains beyond; for the men from Nevada had not been slow to comprehend that the Willie Meena held no promise for them. It was a single rich blow-out in a country otherwise barren; and the tales of the pocket miners, who held claims back of Blackwater, had led to a second stampede.
They were swimming the stream against a strong current, their bodies low in the water and so closely packed that he could almost have stepped from one shaggy head to another. Not fifty yards from him they scrambled ashore and went lumbering into the hazy dusk. Something had frightened them and they were on a stampede. Even the river had not stopped their flight.
"Now what are you driving at? You've got something in your head. Out with it!" "It may sound foolish, but " "But what?" "While Jupiter was bad, he showed none of the signs that come from a fit of purely bad temper that is, before the stampede." "That's right." "Then what brought it on?" asked Phil looking Mr. Sparling squarely in the eyes.
Down the long length of the valley they swept, gathering to themselves other herds and other riders as incensed as were themselves. It is not pretty work, nor amusing, to gallop madly in the wake of a stampede at night, keeping up the stragglers and taking the chance of a broken neck with the rain to make matters worse.
"Then no very great harm will be done; will there?" asked Dick. "Not much, unless the cattle get frightened and start to stampede. That's what I'm afraid of, and why I'm riding over there. We can't hope to put out the fire."
In a moment they would be in a mad rush, trampling each other under foot in their efforts to escape. Phil bounded toward the band. "Play! Play!" he shouted. "They'll stampede if you don't. Play, I tell you!" The bandmaster waved his baton and the music of the band drowned out the mutterings of the storm for the moment. Suddenly the roaring without grew louder.
Jumping their ponies bareback and putting ropes in the animals' mouths, they had hurried to the place from which the shots came and got there before I did. The marauders proved to be a party of fifty or more Sioux, who had endeavored to stampede our animals. They were painfully surprised to find their inveterate enemies, the Pawnees, coming toward them at full gallop.
"If it isn't any worse than that we're lucky," was the answer. "How do you mean?" asked Dick. "I mean if we don't lose any cattle. The grass isn't any good after it dries up on the ground, the way this has. But if the fire starts a stampede of cattle that will mean a loss." "Do you think that's what the game is?" asked Nort, encouraging his pony, Blaze, by patting the animal's neck.
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