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Updated: June 25, 2025
Get up, everybody!" we were almost thrown into a panic. Many of the boys ran for their night-horses, but Clay Zilligan and I fell on the cook and shook the statement out of him that the cattle had left their beds. This simplified the situation, but before I could recall the men, several of them had reached the bed-ground.
Ten days afterward I noticed a number of my steers were ailing; their ears drooped, they refused to eat, and fell to the rear as we grazed forward. The next morning there were forty head unable to leave the bed-ground, and by noon a number of them had died. I had heard of Texas fever, but always treated it as more or less a myth, and now it held my little herd of natives in its toils.
That probably meant a big herd of cattle crossing to the Pecos Valley on the Chisum Trail that led to Fort Stanton. The riders were likely just throwing the beeves from the bed-ground to the trail. The boy waited to make sure of their line of travel. Presently he spoke aloud, after the fashion of the plainsman who spends much time alone in the saddle.
I dubbed around and dodged the loop long as I could stand it, and then I drifted. "I kinda got hungry for the feel of a good horse between m' legs once more. It made me mad to see houses on every decent bed-ground, and fences so thick yuh couldn't get out and fan the breeze if yuh tried.
"Red" McGonnigle, however, whether by accident or premeditation, had repaired with his blankets to a bed-ground where the Almighty could not have found him with a spy-glass. In consequence, Wallie was awakened suddenly by the booming voice of Miss Mercy demanding to know Red's whereabouts. Her lids were puffed as if she had not closed them, and through the slits her eyes gleamed at him.
Lovell insisted on staying with the lead herd, and pressing him in as horse-wrangler, I sent him in the lead with the remuda and wagon, while Levering fell into the swing with the trailing cattle. A breakfast halt was made fully seven miles from the bed-ground, a change of mounts, and then up divide, across mesa, and down slope at the foot of which ran the Platte.
I never caught sight of them until just this side of Prouty. You can sit down, Uncle Joe everything's ready." They talked of the coming snowstorm, and the advisability of holding the sheep on the bed-ground if it should be a bad one; of the trip to town that he was contemplating; of the coyote that was bothering and the possibility of trapping him. There was no dearth of topics of mutual interest.
The sheriff discovered the place where they had been sleeping. His eyes lit with the eagerness of the hunter who has come on the spoor. He had found two sets of tracks leading from the bed-ground. One of these showed no heel marks and the deep impress of toes in the soft sand. The other presented a more sharply defined print with a greater distance between the steps.
So the strangeness of the morning to those who watched from the ship was more like the strangeness of an alien land on Earth than that of a wholly alien planet. The lower dawnmist thinned. Gazing down, Cochrane saw dark masses moving slowly past the ship's three metal landing-fins. They were the beasts of the night, moving deliberately from their bed-ground to the vast plains inland.
Exactly as though an unseen hand had shaken her violently, she sat bolt upright and listened. Instantly she was aware that the character of the storm had changed, but it was not that which had aroused her; it was the faint tinkle of bells which told her that the sheep were leaving the bed-ground. Her alert subconscious mind had conveyed the intelligence before even the dog heard and warned her.
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