Straight through the thicket he rode until he reached a barbed-wire fence extending up the river for a considerable distance. This, Skookum had told him, was the cow pasture which he would have to cross on foot, keeping one eye peeled for the big, black bull that had once killed a man and liked it so well he had been trying ever since to repeat the performance. Bud tied the sorrel well out of sight, unbuckled his spurs and hung them on the saddle horn, hitched up his belt and pulled his gun forward, and crawled through the fence. Skookum had advised him to pass the house, hide his horse in the bushes and come back up the river, keeping in the willows on the bank. In that way he would run no risk of the bull, of which Skookum seemed to be in terror almost as great as his fear of his grandfather. This was shorter, however, and Bud remembered how terrible a cross bull can look to a small boy; to a man it is not so formidable. This end of the pasture was brushy, full of the twitterings of bird families, the scurrying of small furred creatures. Blue-bodied flies poised humming just before his face; great, long-legged mosquitoes sang a whining chorus around him. He made his way quickly toward the river, where the bank rose abruptly in a worn sandstone ledge. The pasture gate was built close against the ledge, and it was this point that held most of the danger. Some one at the stables might see him--Skookum had told him that the gate was in sight of the stable, but that the ledge was mostly hidden by the trees. Bud guessed that he would be obliged to walk in the open for a few rods, but with Gelle bullying the cook--or whatever it was he meant to do--even the dogs would have scant attention for any one moving down by the pasture gate. Once, when Skookum had ventured into the pasture after a rabbit that had been caught in a trap and lamed, the black bull had come grumbling ominously from the bushes. Skookum had scrambled up the ledge out of reach of the bull and had waited so long in the shade of a jutting rock that he had gone to sleep. When he awoke the bull was gone, but his grandfather was coming in at the gate, which was almost as bad, so he had cowered down out of sight and waited for that threatening presence to pass. His grandfather had stood for two or three minutes looking back at the house, while he pretended to be fastening the gate behind him, and then he had walked on past where Skookum was hiding and had begun to climb the ledge.