midnight
I rose in the stirrups and whooped like the wildest savage that ever scalped a settler . I think the devil 's imps sleeping somewhere must have heard that whooping . Crowds of cattle , like mobs , are strangely subject to some sudden impulse . Any seamy-faced old drover will illustrate this fact with stories till midnight , telling how Alkire 's cattle resting one morning on Bald Knob suddenly threw up their heads and went crashing for a mile through the underbrush ; and how a line of Queen 's steers charged on a summer evening and swept out every fence in the Tygart 's valley , without a cause so far as the human eye could see and without a warning . Three hundred cattle had crossed , swimming the track of the loop as though they were fenced into it , and I judge there were a hundred in the water , when the remainder of the drove on the south shore made a sudden bolt for the river . The move was so swift and uniform , and the distance to the water so short , that Ump and the ferrymen had barely time to escape being swept in with the steers . The whole drove piled up in the river and began to swim in a black mass toward the north shore .