"I reckon everybody was kind o' surprised that time," chuckled Hugh.
"I don't call that stampede by the antelope, nor the one Tom just spoke about, a real stampede," said Joe; "but that stampede of the yearlings, and the one we had last night, were sure enough the real thing."
"Yes," said Hugh, "those yearlings were scared for keeps. That bunch had just come over the trail from Texas, and the animals were tired and thin. They'd just come in and hadn't been branded. I never would have supposed that they could have stampeded, but they were scared; and they were always afraid of that corral. We never got that bunch into that corral afterward. We had to rope most of 'em out on the flat, and brand 'em that way. It was awful slow work, and before we got through we tried separating 'em into little bunches of forty or fifty, and these little bunches we could get into the corral."
"Wasn't it dark last night?" remarked Donald. "I do not remember ever to have seen a blacker night."
"I guess so," said Joe. "We've all of us been out on some of those black nights when you just can't see anything. Some nights maybe you think it's just as dark as it can possibly get, and then all at once it gets so much darker that you think it hadn't been at all dark before. On some of those nights you can see the electricity on your horse, a sort of blue light running up from your horse's ears and then maybe a little blue flame running down the back of his neck toward your saddle. I never saw cattle run in that kind of weather; though you'd think they would.
"I remember one night of that kind. We were holding the cattle, but it was blowing and raining some, and the herd was drifting along behind us, like it did night before last. There were several of us in front of the cattle; we could hear each other when we called, but we couldn't see each other, nor anything else. There was some lightning--very bright. I had just turned my horse to look back and try to see by the lightning flashes if any of the cattle were slipping by us and getting away, when all at once the lightning struck right in the middle of the bunch. There was about seventeen hundred head of 'em, and for a second it was just like day and I saw the whole bunch. I saw the bolt fall. It seemed to me that the whole middle was knocked out of the herd. I thought I saw two hundred head of cattle drop. They fell in every direction. The cattle didn't run, but that lightning killed seven head.