"Nearer thirty" corrected Dade, and Bill grunted and went on with the story of his misfortunes. Walking became monotonous, and he wearied of soliloquy before the cattle discovered him. "Met quite a band, all of a sudden," said Bill. "They throned up their heads and looked at me like I was wild Injuns, and I shooed 'em off--or tried to. They did run a little piece, and then they all turned and looked a minute, and commenced coming again, heads up and tails a-rising. And," he added naïvely, "I commenced going!" He said he thought that he could go faster than they could come; but the faster he departed, the more eager was their arrival. "Till we was all of us on the gallop and tongues a-hanging." Bill was big, and he was inclined to flesh because of no exercise more strenuous than quelling incipient riots in his place, or weighing the dust that passed into his hands and ownership. He must have run for some distance, since he swore by several forbidden things that the chase lasted for five miles--"And if you don't believe it, you can ride back up the trail till you come to the dent I made with my toes when I started in." Other cattle came up and joined in the race, until Bill had quite a following; and when he was gasping for breath and losing hope of seeing another day, he came upon a live oak, whose branches started almost from the roots and inclined upward so gently that even a fat man who has lost his breath need not hesitate over the climbing. "Thank the good Lord he don't cut all his trees after the same pattern," finished Bill fervently, "and that live oaks ain't built like redwoods. If they was, you'd be wiping off my coat-buttons right now, trying to identify my remains!" Being polite young men, and having a sincere liking for Bill, they hid certain exchanges of grins and glances under their hat-brims (Bill being above them and the brims being wide) and did not by a single word belittle the escape he had had from man-eating cows. Instead, Dade coaxed him down from the tree and onto Surry, swearing solemnly that the horse was quite as safe as the limb to which Bill showed a disposition to cling. Bill was hard to persuade, but since Dade was a man who inspired faith instinctively, the exchange was finally accomplished, Bill still showing that strange, clinging disposition that made him grip the saddle-horn as a drowning man is said to grasp at a straw. So they got him to the house, the two riding Jack's peppery palimeno with some difficulty; while Surry stepped softly that he might not dislodge that burden in the saddle, whose body lurched insecurely and made the horse feel at every step the ignorance of the man. They got him and themselves to the house; and his presence there did its part towards strengthening Don Andres' liking for gringos, while Bill himself gained a broader outlook, a keener perception of the rights of the native-born Californians.