"Clever! Very clever! You can't blame men when beasts stampede! We should accept the evidence that some monstrous herd, making its way through a mountain pass, somehow went crazy and bolted for the plains and this settlement got in the way and it was too bad for the settlement. Everything's explained, except the ship that went to Weald. A cattle stampede, yes. Anybody can believe that! But there was a man-stampede! Men stampeded into the ship as blindly as the cattle trampled down this little town. The ship stampeded off into space as insanely as the cattle. But a stampede of men _and_ cattle, in the same place,--that's a little too much at one time!" "How," asked Calhoun directly, "do you intend to get in touch with your friends here?" "I--I don't know," she said distressedly. "But if--the ship stays here, they're bound to come and see why. Won't they? Or will they?" "If they're sane, they won't," said Calhoun. "The one undesirable thing, here, would be human footprints on top of cattle-tracks. If your friends are a meat-getting party from Dara, as I believe, they should cover up their tracks, get off-planet as fast as possible, and pray that no signs of their former presence are ever discovered. That would be their best first move, certainly!" "What should I do?" she asked helplessly. "I'm far from sure. At a guess, and for the moment, probably nothing. I'll work something out ... I've got the devil of a job before me, though. I can't spend too much time here." "You can--leave me here...." He grunted and turned away. It was naturally unthinkable that he should leave another human being on a supposedly uninhabited planet, with the knowledge that it might actually be uninhabited, and the further knowledge that any visitors would have the strongest of possible reasons to hide themselves away. He believed that there were Darians here, and the girl in the Med ship--so he also believed--was a Darian. But any who might be hiding had so much to lose if they were discovered that they might be hundreds or even thousands of miles from anywhere a space-ship would normally land--if they hadn't fled after the incident of the space-ship's departure with its load of doomed passengers. Considered detachedly, the odds were that there was again a food-shortage on Dara. That blueskins, in desperation, had raided or were raiding or would raid the cattle-herds of Orede for food to carry back to their home planet. That somehow the miners on Orede had found that they had blueskin neighbors, and died of the consequences of their terror. It was a risky guess to make on such evidence as Calhoun considered he had, but no other guess was possible.