So Bill started to walk,
beguiling the time, by soliloquizing upon--well, Bill put it this way:
"I walked and I cussed, and I cussed and I walked, for about four hours
and a half. Say! How do you make out it's only twenty miles?"
"Nearer thirty" corrected Dade, and Bill grunted and went on with the
story of his misfortunes. Walking became monotonous, and he wearied of
soliloquy before the cattle discovered him.
"Met quite a band, all of a sudden," said Bill. "They throned up their
heads and looked at me like I was wild Injuns, and I shooed 'em off--or
tried to. They did run a little piece, and then they all turned and
looked a minute, and commenced coming again, heads up and tails
a-rising. And," he added naively, "I commenced going!" He said he
thought that he could go faster than they could come; but the faster he
departed, the more eager was their arrival. "Till we was all of us on
the gallop and tongues a-hanging."
Bill was big, and he was inclined to flesh because of no exercise more
strenuous than quelling incipient riots in his place, or weighing the
dust that passed into his hands and ownership. He must have run for some
distance, since he swore by several forbidden things that the chase
lasted for five miles--"And if you don't believe it, you can ride back
up the trail till you come to the dent I made with my toes when I
started in."
Other cattle came up and joined in the race, until Bill had quite a
following; and when he was gasping for breath and losing hope of seeing
another day, he came upon a live oak, whose branches started almost from
the roots and inclined upward so gently that even a fat man who has lost
his breath need not hesitate over the climbing.
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