his mother if he could now, but she paid no attention. She was walking very fast, looking straight ahead of her. At last he caught her

skirt and she stopped quickly, bent down and put her arms tight around him, drawing in her breath in sharp little gasps. He was afraid she was going to cry. He had never seen her cry, and it frightened him.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, drawing away.

“Nothing. Just take them off, sonny, and how’d you like to go across the fields now and bring the cows? I’m a little anxious about Dolly.”

CHAPTER II.

“A billion elements go into the making of a boy, but there is one fundamental agent of his greatness or commonness—his mother.”—Will Levington Comfort.

Fears for Dolly were not ungrounded. Following the instinct of her kind, the aristocratic little Jersey had slipped away by herself on this particular afternoon. Billy found the rest of the cows waiting at the bars, lowing to be milked after a day on the heavy spring pasture. It was only necessary to let them into the lane and they started off home in a bobbing file. To find the missing cow was another proposition.

Billy knew the magnitude of the task, and planned his course with the ingenuity of a general. He would climb the hill first and inspect the cedar thickets; then he would come down through the gully where the rocks and thorns and hazel bushes made strange hiding places. If she wasn’t there he would have to inspect the fence into the neighbor’s woods. The pasture was rough and thickety, but he knew every foot of the ground—he had covered it on similar occasions before, and if he suffered some anxiety as to whether he could locate the cow

before dark, there was also a pleasant little thrill of adventure in the undertaking.

But Dolly wasn’t among the cedars, and she hadn’t found a shelter in the valley. The shadows were creeping out long and misty when Billy, with an unsteady feeling under his belt, turned his scrutiny to the line fence. Sure enough, there was a spot where the dead bush topping the ridge of piled up stones was trampled and broken. The high-strung little heifer had taken a dangerous climb to find a sanctuary worthy of her great moment. Beyond the break in the fence there wasn’t a clue to the direction she had taken—nothing but solid, damp woods, and it was getting dark. Then over the fields came two slow, familiar calls from the dinner bell. A warm flood of relief came over Billy; his mother was telling him to come home—maybe his father had come back and would hunt the cow.

Dan hadn’t come home yet. He was just driving into the yard when Billy came up. Besides, he had spent the afternoon in a rather noisy hang-out in town and was in no humor for hunting stray cattle.

“Chores all done?” he asked in the edged voice that the family had learned to listen for. Billy had never thought of chores. He remembered them now with a feeling of guilt. At the same time his quick senses observed the quietness of the pigs in the pen, the horses crunching their

hay in the stable. “Seems as if mother’s done them,” he replied. “I went from the funeral to get the cows. Dolly’s missing.”

“You mean to say you went off all afternoon when you knew that heifer needed watchin’? And you haven’t found her yet? Well, just git right back and stay till you do find her. Never mind about your mother callin’ you. You ain’t dealin’ with your mother now. What I’m telling’ you is not to show yourself back here till you find that cow, if it takes you till daylight.”

If the task of finding a hiding cow in the woods at night had seemed impossible before, it was the last thing Billy hoped for now, as he stumbled rapidly back over the humpy path through the stubble field, blinding, angry tears burning his eyes and a child’s bitter vengeance surging up inside of him and finding an outlet in strange, mad little curses. At the edge of the woods the feeling began to cool in a new sensation. Billy wouldn’t have admitted what it was, but the place was so still and dark and far away from everywhere, that the breaking of a dry twig under his feet set his pulses beating wildly. There were weird stories afloat in the neighborhood that the wood was a dark haunt of tramps, and ever since old Enoch, the half-witted brother of a neighbor, had wandered off and gotten lost in the heart of it and only his pitiful crying had brought the men with their lanterns, school children

had avoided it as the abode of all things lunatic and uncanny.

But Billy couldn’t avoid it now. With hands clenched and legs stiffened and cold he began his lone patrol, rustling the dead leaves as little as possible and stopping to listen every few seconds, as he groped deeper into the blackness. Once he called “Dolly,” but the hoarse, strained voice came whispering back from behind a hundred tree trunks. He didn’t move till they had finished. Once he stumbled against a rotten log, and a cat leaped almost from under his feet and shot in long lopes off into the bracken. Instinctively Billy broke off a dead limb—he had heard of ugly encounters with bush cats in the hungry season, and the consciousness that his presence of mind hadn’t entirely left him brought new courage. For the first time since he entered the wood he really remembered what he was there for. The blood began to circulate in his shaking limbs, and he found himself peering into the blackness and listening—not for “sounds” this time, but for Dolly.

Years after, in a wood in Flanders, on a night mercifully blacker than this, moving like a shadow among the willows, keeping his eyes raised from the pitiful staring eyes on the ground around him, and calling softly in a voice scarcely above the warm, scented wind off the field, his memory played him a strange trick. A

shutter in his brain seemed to click, revealing for an instant an old picture, as though this experience had happened to him before somewhere. Was the thing “getting” him as he had seen it get others? With a new terror in his drawn face he put his hand to his head and whispered, “Oh, God, not that!” Then over his bleared consciousness came a tinkling like a little bell, and a voice, clear, sweet and confident: “Billy, boy, it’s all right. I’m here.” And the tears came with a flood of relief and comfort, just as they had done years before when he stood in the woods of the old swamp farm, hearing her call and the tinkling of her milk pail. She had come to help him.

So are the hardest experiences made bearable by such a love, and the bitterest tragedies averted even through its memory.

It was a strong, free “Whoo-oo,” that the boy sent ringing through the woods now. It started a dozen little creatures scuttling back to their holes—and right beside him a crackling of dead underbrush, the sound of a short, quick trot, a low bellow either of fear or warning, then not five yards away from him, with lowered head and eyes blazing in the darkness stood the Jersey heifer.

Billy knew that for the moment the gentle, domesticated little beast was as dangerous as any of the wild cattle of the plains. A few minutes before he would have been paralyzed at

the vague shape in the darkness with its blazing eyes and low, threatening guttural sounds. Now, with the confidence inspired by his mother’s nearness, came a self mastery and a happy feeling of competence. He advanced steadily, ready to dart behind a tree if the cow showed any real sign of attack, calmly enough repeating, “Steady, Dolly; so, Boss.” Evidently the cow recognized and trusted him; he had petted her all her life; also he was not coming near her calf. She had hidden it in a spot quite safe from intrusion. Sure of that she was not averse to being friendly. There was nothing to do but to try to make her comfortable where she was for the night; that was why his mother