At last they were only six miles from home. Christmas was only three days away. Then the oxen stalled in a mudhole at the crossing on La Parra Creek. For an hour Mr. Cude struggled and worried with them, trying to make them make the supreme pull. Mrs. Cude threw all her strength on the spoke of one wheel. Finally Mr. Cude began the weary business of unloading some of the freight and carrying it on his back out of the creek. Then suddenly they were aware of a man, dismounted from the horse beside him, standing on the bank just ahead. Being down in the creek, they could not have seen his approach. His frame, though lank, was well filled out, his face all bearded, his clothes nondescript. In his posture was something of the soldier. Nearly all Southern men had, in those days, been soldiers. For a second he seemed to be holding something back; then he gave a hearty greeting that was cordially responded to. “Those look like mighty good oxen,” the young man said, coming down, as any stranger in that country at that time would come to help anybody in a tight. “They are good oxen, but they won’t pull this wagon out now,” Mr. Cude answered. “I guess they’re getting old like us. We been working them since before the war.” The stranger had moved around so that he was very near the wheel oxen, which he faced, instead of the driver and his wife. His hand was on Brindle’s head, between the long rough horns, and the old ox, whose countenance was the same whether in a bog hole or a patch of spring tallow weed, licked out his tongue. “I believe I can make these old boys haul the wagon out,” the man said. “They wouldn’t do any better for a stranger than for their master,” Mr. Cude answered. “There’s only one person who could get them to pull,” added Mrs. Cude. “That’s our boy who went to the war.” “Did he know oxen?” the young man asked out of his beard. “Oh, yes, and they knew him. They liked him.” Then for a little while there was silence. As Mr. Cude began drawing up his rawhide whip, again the offerer of help, pleading now, asked for a chance to try his hand. “Very well,” Mr. Cude agreed slowly, “but every time you try to make ’em pull and they don’t budge the wagon, they’re that much harder to get against the yoke the next time.” [Illustration] The young man asked the names of the oxen and got them. Then he took the long whip, not to lash the animals--for that was not the whip’s function--but to pop it. He swung it lightly and tested the popper three or four times, as if getting back the feel of something long familiar that had been laid aside. Then he curved the fifteen feet of tapering plaited rawhide through the air--and the ringing crack made the sky brighter. At the same time he began calling to the oxen to come on and pull out. He talked to Brindle and Whitey and Sam Houston and Davy Crockett harder than a Negro crapshooter talking to his bones.