Six Little Bunkers at Cowboy Jacks | Page 8

mud.
"What do you know about that!" cried Tad Munson. "That's John
Winsome's red calf. See! He's sunk clear to his backbone in the mud."
"Oh, dear me!" cried Rose. "The poor thing!"
She had said that twice before, but everybody was so excited that none
of them noticed that Rose was repeating herself. In fact, both Vi and
Margy said the very same thing, and in chorus:
"Oh, the poor thing!"
"Is that a red calf, Tad Munson?" asked Laddie. "For if it is, it's a riddle.
Its head and its neck and its tail are all splattered with mud."
"It was a red calf when it went into the swamp, all right," said Tad with
confidence. "I know that calf, all right. And John Winsome told me
only this morning that he had lost it."
"Who put it in that horrid swamp?" Vi demanded.
"I guess it just wandered in," said Tad.
"And it is sinking down right now," Russ tried. "See it?"
Indeed the poor calf--a well grown animal--was in a very serious plight.
It was eight or ten feet from the edge of the road where the logs were.
And the calf had evidently struggled a good deal and was now quite
exhausted. It turned its head to look at the children and blatted again.
"Oh, dear!" said Margy, almost in tears, "it is asking us to help it just as

plain as it can."
"I'm going to run and tell John Winsome--right now I am!" shouted Tad,
and he turned around and ran back along the road they had come just as
fast as he could run.
But Russ stayed where he was. His lips were still puckered in a whistle
and he was thinking hard.
"What can we do for the poor calf, Russ?" asked Rose.
She seemed to think that her brother would think up some way of
helping the mired creature. No knowing how long Tad would be in
finding the owner, and it looked as though the calf was sinking all the
time.
Russ Bunker had quite an inventive mind. The other children were
helpless in this emergency, but he began to see how he could help the
calf stuck in the muddy swamp. He ran to the roadside fence, which
was a good deal broken down just at the edge of the open swamp lands.
The fence rails were so old and dry that Russ could pull them, one at a
time, away from the posts. He dragged the first one to the spot where
the calf was blatting so pitifully. Although these cedar rails had been
split out of logs many years before, they were still very strong.
"Come on, Rose! You can help drag these rails too," cried Russ, quite
excited by the thought that he might be able to save the calf before Tad
Munson brought help.
"Oh! what are you going to do? Are you going to burn that poor calf
like the Indians used to burn folks?" asked Vi, who remembered
something she had heard at Uncle Fred's ranch. "You going to burn the
calf at the stake?"
This was a horrifying thought, but even Laddie, who was very
tender-hearted, was too much excited to think of this. He said to his
twin sister:

"How silly, Vi! You couldn't burn those old rails on that wet place. The
fire would go right out."
"Russ won't burn it, or let it drown either," Margy said, with much
confidence in their older brother.
Meanwhile Russ and Rose were pulling off fence-rails and dragging
them to the edge of the swamp. Then, while Rose brought more, Russ
began to lay the rails on the quivering mire, side by side but about a
foot apart, the ends of the first row of rails being only a few inches
from the side of the calf.
Having made a foundation of four rails upon the soft muck, Russ began
to lay the next tier across them, thus building a platform. It was a shaky
platform, but he crept out upon it slowly and carefully and the lower
rails did not sink much.
"Won't you sink down in the mud, too, if you do that, Russ?" asked Vi
curiously. "Won't those old rails get splinters in your hands?"
"Oh!" cried Laddie, jumping up and down in his excitement, "then
you'll be the riddle, Russ. 'I went out to the woodpile and got it'--you
know."
"Maybe it's a riddle--what I'm going to do for the poor calf when I can
reach him," their brother said. "I know I can get to him; but how can I
pull him up out of the mud?"
This was a harder question to answer than one of Vi's. The rails did not
sink much under Russ's weight, and he