He stumbled, half turned—and hark! the strange, challenging cry was repeated again and again, until it actually brought him to a halt but a few paces from poor Sin, who had struggled to her feet and was sobbing aloud as she tried to run with a twisted ankle. And now the bewildered animal stood pawing the sod and bellowing in hoarse response, until both girls had reached a place of safety.
“Well, that _was_ a close call, and no mistake!” Cynthia had quite recovered her spirits in the course of an hour or so, and was obviously enjoying her own importance as the heroine of so rare an adventure, while she nursed her sprained ankle on the shabby cushions of Doctor Brown’s top-buggy. Poor Doris, still pale and tearful, was squeezed in between Cynthia and the Doctor, while Mrs. Brown remained in temporary charge of her protesting brother, and Stella, who had insisted upon walking, was already far ahead.
The gruff Doctor assented, with an appraising eye, meanwhile, upon the solitary girlish figure moving so rapidly before them, along the hilly country road. The Doctor was not a man of unnecessary words; but if he had spoken out his thought just then, it would have sounded something like this:
“There’s the right stuff in that girl—no question about it! I wonder—”
When Uncle Si, getting “so’s to be ’round” again, heard all about Stella and the Wolcott bull, the immediate results were two.
First, the bull was promptly sold—a surprising occurrence to those who best knew Silas Wolcott and his deep-rooted objection to disposing of any “critter” whatsoever that had been raised on the home place. No fowl was too old or too tough for home consumption, and indeed Uncle had developed no mean skill in softening gallinaceous tissues and imparting a delicious flavor by braising for twelve hours or thereabouts, with peppercorns and sweet herbs, in an old-fashioned bean-pot. But superfluous calves and superannuated horses were said to owe their immunity from sale to the fact that they had been “born on the old farm,” a fact which to his mind appeared to constitute a lifelong claim upon its hospitality.
Consequence number two, our heroine was actually adopted, to the extent of being formally requested to call the old man “Uncle,” which she shyly but joyfully proceeded to do. It was one more milestone on her long and often lonely road to “some really true relations.”