"Sho," drawled Hugh; "haven't I told you time and again that we all of us measure up things by what we ourselves have seen, and we find it hard to believe anything that's outside the range of our own experience. If there was any way of proving it, I'd be willing to bet a good horse and saddle and bridle that if we'd been there we'd all have acted just the way those Indians did." CHAPTER XIII BIG WOLVES It happened the next day that Jack was riding circle on the far side of the ground that was being covered. Almost all day he rode without seeing any cattle, and it was well along in the afternoon when he came up to the top of a ridge and stopped his horse just before he reached its crest. Here he dismounted and, walking up, peeped over to see what there might be on the other side. This of course was not at all what most cowboys would have done, but the habits of caution taught Jack by Hugh in the early days of his travels in the West were too firmly fixed to be overcome, and when alone Jack always looked over a hill in this way. Rather to his surprise he saw down in a little flat, five hundred yards away, a small bunch of cattle--perhaps eighteen or twenty head. This was a surprise, partly because he had seen none during the day, but chiefly because the cattle were close bunched, as if brought together by a herder. For an instant he did not comprehend what this meant, but then his eye caught two gray animals--big wolves--which were slowly walking about the herd. Evidently the cattle had come together for protection, and were standing there, heads out, ready to repel an attack if it should be made on them. Jack felt that he ought to ride down and drive off the wolves and bring the cattle in, but, on the other hand, he was very curious to see what the wolves would do. More than once he had seen coyotes trying to take from a cow a young calf that was by her side, but this was the first time he had seen big wolves round up cattle. He waited, therefore, to see what would happen, thinking that after a little while the wolves would probably give up the job and go off in search of some single animal which they could run down and kill, as he had once seen them do on his way out from the railroad to his uncle's ranch.