Brother Fielding remarked, "I think it is useless for you to start out to hunt the cattle; I have inquired of all the herdsmen and at every house for miles, and I believe they have been driven off." Joseph was evidently of the same opinion, still he had more faith in his mother finding them, if they could be found, than he had either in his uncle or himself. He knew that she had been praying to the Lord for assistance, and he felt almost sure that the Lord would hear her prayers. Doubtless he would have felt quite sure had he not been so disheartened by the apparently thorough but fruitless search of the morning. He felt, however to follow her example: he prayed that his mother might be guided to the cattle, and exercised all the faith he could muster, striving hard to feel confident that she would be successful. As she was following the little stream, directly in the course she had taken on leaving the wagons, one of the drovers rode up on the opposite side and said, "Madam, I saw your cattle this morning over in those woods," pointing almost directly opposite to the course she was taking. She paid no attention to him, but passed right on. He repeated his information; still she did not heed him. He then rode off hurriedly, and, in a few moments, with his companions, began to gather up their cattle and start them on the road towards St. Joseph. She had not gone far when she came upon a small ravine filled with tall willows and brush; but not tall enough to be seen above the high grass of the prairie. In a dense cluster of these willows she found the oxen so entangled in the brush, and fastened by means of withes, that it was with great difficulty that she extricated them from their entanglement. This was evidently the work of these honest (?) drovers, who so hurriedly disappeared--seeing they could not turn her from her course--perhaps in search of estray honesty, which it is to be hoped they found. This circumstance made an indelible impression upon the mind of the lad, Joseph. He had witnessed many evidences of God's mercy, in answer to prayer, before; but none that seemed to strike him so forcibly as this. Young as he was, he realized his mother's anxiety to emigrate with her family to the valley in the Spring, and their dependence upon their teams to perform that journey, which, to him, seemed a formidable, if not an impossible, undertaking in their impoverished circumstances. It was this that made him so disheartened and sorrowful when he feared that the cattle would never be found. Besides, it seemed to him that he could not bear to see such a loss and disappointment come upon his mother, whose life he had known, from his earliest recollection, had been a life of toil and struggle for the maintenance and welfare of her family. His joy, therefore, as he looked through tears of gratitude to God for His kind mercy extended to the "widow and the fatherless" may be imagined, as he ran to meet his mother driving the oxen towards the wagons.