Big Medicine saw them start, and came bellowing up from the far side of the huddle like a bull challenging to combat from across a meadow.

Big Medicine did not know what it was all about, but he scented battle, and that was sufficient.

Cal Emmett and Weary, equally ignorant of the cause, started at a lope toward the trouble center.
It began to look as if the whole Family was about to fall upon those herders and rend them asunder with teeth and nails; so much so that the herders jumped up and ran like scared cottontails toward the rim of Denson coulee, a hundred yards or so to the west.
"Mamma! I wish we could make the sheep hit that gait and keep it," exclaimed Weary, with the first laugh they had heard from him that day.
While he was still laughing, there was a shot from the ridge toward which they were running; the sharp, vicious crack of a rifle.

The Happy Family heard the whistling hum of the bullet, singing low over their heads; quite low indeed; altogether too low to be funny.

And they had squandered all their ammunition on the prairie sod, to hurry a band of sheep that flatly refused to hurry anywhere except under one another's odorous, perspiring bodies.
From the edge of the coulee the rifle spoke again.