As they trotted cheerily homeward, the wolfhound kept close to O’Donnell’s horse, and whenever she glanced up at him, frisking clumsily the while, he grinned down at her. “You’ve wiped out your fault, Shee-la. You’ve done more than most,” he observed seriously, as they neared the ranch. “I thought once I’d have to send you away. Or--or send you out on the long trail.” Shiela leaped playfully at his horse’s bridle. “But we’ll stick together. Only,” he drew a deep breath, “we’ll take a holiday. We’ll go back--back home to County Mayo, old girl.” VI MOLLY It may be there are persons who will scoff at the assertion that there is more of sentiment in a cow than in any creature of four legs that walks the earth. Cavilers, these--hard-shelled individuals who look at the gentle bovine through the eye of commercialism, not gifted to see beyond her barnyard activities toward the nourishment of mankind. It is reasonably established that one may approach a horse in comradely security, confident of fair play. The rules as to hybrids are these: you walk up to a mule in a spirit of veneration and religious preparedness, wearing a sickly aspect of confidence. And you quaver soothing words and carry a club behind your back. But toward a cow--ah, that is different. Here is a mainstay of life, a pillar and prop of civilization. Here is--well, a cow is a cow. Why, there was the time when three hundred furiously anxious, bawling mothers smashed out of a stout wooden corral on the Turkey Track range and laid a straight course across seven leagues of territory, in quest of their helpless progeny, mercilessly cooped in cars at a railroad siding, awaiting shipment to an Arizona butcher. They kept two well-grown men atop a water-tank for five hours, and--but to attempt a citation of cases would be idle. This is the simple tale of Molly. She was not an especially pretty animal, Molly--just plain cow, dun in color, with a Jersey strain somewhere among her remote forebears. Yet, one could not gaze on Molly for long without a feeling of profound respect pervading his soul. It was not because one could see with half an eye that she gave large quantities of milk; that was merely the performance of her natural functions. Nor was it that her wistful regard suggested all the sorrows of her sex. Molly in some way made a subtle appeal to sympathy that cannot be voiced. As a matter of fact, she ought to have been the pampered occupant of a clover field by day and of a stall by night. Instead, she was roaming the zacaton flats of the Tumbling K and losing herself among the blackbrush ridges, in vague wonder that the world was grown so large. Designed to be a respectable milch-cow on a dairy farm, here she was in the heart of a wilderness, and all because of a boy.