‘MIDST THE LITTLE STREAMS. 175 
far away up the Valley of the Little Streams 
came a sound, and the sound was a strange, 
unearthly roar, like unto no other sound you 
ever heard in all your life, and it was coming 
steadily nearer. 
‘Wuffl’ said old Ephraim, deep in his 
cavernous chest, and coming down on all 
fours, slouched across the trail as silently as 
any cat, and faded into the landscape quick 
as you could wink. He always did that; it 
was one of the little tricks he kept up his 
great furry sleeve. 
Two hundred yards away he stopped, and 
lay down in a thicket of flaming maple. He 
could see up the trail from here, and, of course, 
he had the wind the right way. 
And the roaring grew steadily nearer and 
nearer, filling the valley from gray peak to 
gray peak with a storm of sound. 
Then a-riding down the trail came a man 
on a black horse, and it was as if the ground 
behind him crawled with cattle, hundreds and 
hundreds of cattle, going down from some re- 
mote mountain ranch to the railway—tinned 
beef to be. They were the roaring noise. 
On they came, and old Ephraim watched 
them come, till the black horse struck the spot 
where he himself had crossed the trail, and, 
without warning, horse and leading cattle 
