But here the girl was plainly in view.  Calhoun increased his stride.  He began to gain on her.  She did not look behind.

Murgatroyd said “Chee!” in a complaining tone.

“I should have left you behind,” agreed Calhoun dourly, “but there was and is a chance I won’t get back.  You’ll have to keep on hiking.”

He plodded on.  His memory of the terrain around the mining settlement told him that there was no definite destination in the girl’s mind.  But she was in no such despair as to want deliberately to be lost.  She’d guessed, Calhoun believed, that if there were Darians on the planet, they’d keep the landing-grid under observation.

If they saw her leave that area and could see that she was alone, they should intercept her to find out the meaning of the Med Ship’s landing.  Then she could identify herself as one of them and give them the terribly necessary warning of Weald’s suspicions.

“But,” said Calhoun sourly, “if she’s right, they’ll have seen me marching after her now, which spoils her scheme.  And I’d like to help it, but the way she’s going is too dangerous!”

He went down into one of the hollows of the uneven plain.  He saw a clump of a dozen or so cattle a little distance away.  The bull looked up and snorted.  The cows regarded him truculently.  Their air was not one of bovine tranquility.

He was up the farther hillside and out of sight before the bull worked himself up to a charge.  Then Calhoun suddenly remembered one of the items in the data about cattle he’d looked into just the other day.  He felt himself grow pale.

“Murgatroyd!” he said sharply.  “We’ve got to catch up!  Fast!  Stay with me if you can, but—­” he was jog-trotting as he spoke—­“even if you get lost I have to hurry!”

He ran fifty paces and walked fifty paces.  He ran fifty and walked fifty.  He saw her, atop a rolling of the ground.  She came to a full stop.  He ran.  He saw her turn to retrace her steps.  He flung off the safety of the blast-rifle and let off a roaring blast at the ground for her to hear.

Suddenly she was fleeing desperately, toward him.  He plunged on.  She vanished down into a hollow.  Horns appeared over the hillcrest she’d just left.  Cattle appeared.  Four, a dozen fifteen, twenty!  They moved ominously in her wake.

He saw her again, running frantically over another upward swell of the prairie.  He let off another blast to guide her.  He ran on at top speed with Murgatroyd trailing anxiously behind.  From time to time Murgatroyd called “Chee-chee-chee!” in frightened pleading not to be abandoned.

More cattle appeared against the horizon.  Fifty or a hundred.  They came after the first clump.  The first group of a bull and his harem were moving faster, now.  The girl fled from them, but it is the instinct of beef-cattle on the open range—­Calhoun had learned it only two days before—­to charge any human they find on foot.  A mounted man to their dim minds is a creature to be tolerated or fled from, but a human on foot is to be crushed and stamped and gored.