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Updated: May 23, 2025
The "year one" was a good while ago, but a good deal of hard tramping, by many bisons, year after year, had been required to make that ancient cattle-path. No grass had grown upon it for nobody could guess how many generations, and it was likely to be in the way of ploughing whenever that plain should be turned into farming-land.
Some madcap boys with an appetite for the horrible plucked up courage to venture through the dried marsh by the cattle-path, and come before the house at a spectral hour when the air was full of bats.
Once, late in July, when the badgers were busily catching beetles by the side of the cattle-path, Brock, thrusting his snout into the grass to secure a crawling insect, chanced to hear a faint, continuous sound, as of a number of tiny creatures moving to and fro in a hollow beneath the moss-covered mound at his feet.
Completely deceived by the ruse, the fox was drawn further and further from the nest, till he reached a distant corner of the pond, when, to his astonishment, the moorhen vanished, leaving him to a vain search which at last so much annoyed him that, instead of returning along the bank towards the nest, he crossed the glen, trotted up the cattle-path, and entered the dense thicket on the slope.
The cattle-path to the town is much too rough for our guns, so Captain Heinze and the gun detail will remain here and co-operate with General Garcia. Let your men get all the sleep they can now. They must march again at midnight. They will carry nothing but their guns and ammunition and rations for one meal. If everything goes as we expect, we will breakfast in Santa Barbara."
They had lost their road and turned, whilst they were indulging those golden fancies, into a mere cattle-path worn by the numerous herds of goats and oxen, the music of whose jangling bells still came to them now and then in low sweet snatches from the pastures of the valley and hill. What was to be done?
Just when they began to think of returning, Louis noticed a beaten path, where there seemed recent prints of cattle hoofs on a soft spongy soil beyond the creek. "Come, Hector," said he gaily, "this is lucky; we are on the cattle-path; no fear but it will lead us directly home, and that by a nearer track."
Sometimes they wandered in the corn and root-crop, or in the hayfield where the sorrel, a cooling medicinal herb for many of the woodland folk, grew long and succulent; and sometimes they descended the steep cattle-path on the far side of the farm, where the big dor-beetles, as plentiful there as in the grass-clumps of the open pasture, were easily struck down while they circled, droning loudly, about the heaps of refuse near the hedge.
Luscious snails, with striped yellow and brown shells, were so common in the ditch beyond a certain cattle-path, that, even after a whole day's fast, her hunger was quickly appeased. April drew near, the leaves of the trees expanded, and the voice of the night wind in the branches changed from a moan to a whisper.
His horse shied at the unusual sight, and furthermore took exception to the raucous sound of a man's voice chanting a dismal melody, somewhere away down by the river on his right. In this direction he observed a cattle-path. And the sight of it suggested ascertaining the identity of the doleful minstrel. No doubt this man could give him the information he needed.
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