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The foot of the horse, traveling and often mired in a rough muddy highway, was its swiftest courier. Letters carried by horses or slow steamboats were the only media of communication between people separated by wide distances. The learned wrote letters of astonishing length and literary finish letters which were passed from hand to hand and read aloud in large and small assemblies.

Riders shouted and lashed unavailingly with their quirts, trying to hold back the full bulk of the herd until the foremost had slaked their thirst and gone on. But the herd was crazy for the water, and the foremost were plunged headlong into the soft mud where they mired, trampled under the hoofs of those who came crowding from behind.

There was only a small trickle of water. It was in the very middle, the lowest point of the stream, and up to the very edge of this the thirst-tortured cattle pressed, sinking down deep in the soft mud. "We've got to get 'em out of that," declared the ranchman. "A lot of 'em will be mired if we don't." "There are some mired now," said Skinny, pointing. "Ed and Foster are trying to yank 'em out."

Then, still scornful of evasion, she mounted and rode away as straight-shouldered and militant a figure as Jeanne d'Arc herself. Bud Sellers, looking after her from the door of the bank, was gloomy of countenance beyond his wont. As the mule ambled along the mired streets of the wretched hamlet there were eyes following its course that masked an interest beyond the usual.

"But you saw that I had lost control, and if you'd only wanted you could have stopped its plunge; but you'd rather see me get into a peck of trouble. How d'ye suppose I'm ever going to lug that heavy thing back up to the road now?" demanded Ferd, spitefully. "Oh! I don't mind giving you a hand at that. I hate to see such a fine machine lying in the mud like a mired cow," declared Dick, cheerfully.

Ruth saddled her mare, and rode off in the direction of the gap, thoughtfully. Mr. Strongtharm had given her a new notion. . . . It was close upon nightfall when she returned. She was muddy, but cheerful; and she hummed a song to herself in her chamber as she slid off her mired garments and attired herself for supper. That song was her nesting song.

Uncle Jake, however, was cunning of fence. "I don't feel lonesome," he declared. "Ye see I'm a cattle man, an' I like the travelled trails. I ain't huntin' no quicksands. Many a feller has mired down tryin' a new crossin'. No, sir, I calkilate ter remain single." "He's very foxy," commented Ajax, "but he means business. It really bothers me that they won't confide in us."

The following morning Pan and Joe rode up to the next boghole. They found seventeen mired cattle. "Nice an' deep," said Joe. "Damn these heah cows, allus pickin' out quicksand!" It took until noon to pull them out. Another boghole showed twenty-four more in deep. "How many more bogholes on Limestone?" asked Pan. "Only four an' the wust ones," replied Joe, groaning.

"It seems so," said Pennington. "This is a big country down here, and we can fight one Confederate army while another is mired up a hundred miles away. "That's General Grant's plan. He doesn't look like any hero of romance, but he acts like one. He plunges into the middle of the enemy, and if he gets licked he's up and at 'em again right away."

Struggling in the Slough of Despond, she had come upon one worse mired than she, for whose sake she must search yet more vigorously after the hidden stepping-stones the peaks whose bases are the center of the world. "God help me!" she said ever and anon as she went, and every time she said it, she quickened her pace and ran. It was just breakfast-time when she reached the house.