"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.
"Thank the good Lord he don't cut all his trees after the same pattern," finished Bill fervently, "and that live oaks ain't built like redwoods.
If they was, you'd be wiping off my coat-buttons right now, trying to identify my remains!" Being polite young men, and having a sincere liking for Bill, they hid certain exchanges of grins and glances under their hat-brims (Bill being above them and the brims being wide) and did not by a single word belittle the escape he had had from man-eating cows.