During our stay, my original failure to leap, on my arrival, “from the locomotive to the back of a bucking bronco” had more or less been effaced from the memory of the cowboys by subsequent adventures, and the last day that we spent under the cottonwood-trees, by the banks of the Little Missouri, was made significant by the “surprise” gotten up by Merrifield and Sylvane for the special edification of my brother and husband. The surprise took the form of the “wrastling” of a calf by no less a person than myself! Merrifield had taught me to rope an animal, Sylvane had shown me with praiseworthy regularity the method of throwing a calf, and the great occasion was heralded amongst the other members of the party by an invitation to sit on the fence of the corral at three o’clock, the last afternoon of our visit to Elkhorn, and thus witness the struggle between a young woman of the East and a bovine denizen of the Western prairies. The corral, a plot of very muddy ground (having been watered by a severe rain the night before), was walled in by a fence, and generally used when we wished to keep the ponies from straying. On this occasion, however, it was emptied of all _but_ the calf, which was to be the object of my efforts and prowess. I was then introduced by Merrifield, very much as the circus rider used to be introduced in the early Barnum and Bailey days; then followed a most gruelling pantomime; the calf, which was of an unusually unpleasant size, galloped around the corral and I, knee-deep in mud, galloped after it, and finally succeeded in achieving the first necessity, which was to rope it around the neck. After that, the method of procedure was as follows: The “wrastler”--on this occasion my unfortunate self--was supposed to get close enough to the animal in question to throw himself or herself across the back of the galloping calf, with the purpose of catching the left leg of the animal, the leg, in fact, farthest away from one’s right arm. If this deed could be accomplished and the leg forcibly bent under the calf, both calf and rider would go down in an inextricable heap, and the “wrastling” of the calf would be complete.