264

Saturday October 11th

It looked so much like rain this morning just before we hooked to the spreader that we decided to hook to the waggon first and get the husked corn, but just as we were about to start it began to rain so we put the horses in again. Old Jonas came in from the field, and entertained us for a while with a wild west personal experience of how he was stranded out west somewhere in Michigan fell in with a gambling cowboy, and {made?} a pile in a hurry & revolvers knives, etc. Jonas has seen some awful times in his day if all accounts are true.

We then got the sheep in the barn and marked them all with blue chalk and dad. put the new tag we got from Dunkin in his sheep's ear and stuck up the tame ones ear with sticking plaster as she caught he tag in some thing or other day and tore her ear the full length. By this time the rain has let up and Jonas gone back to husk so we went out with the waggon and got about a load (21 bushels) but before we came in it was raining hard and we got prety wet. It rained ost of the afternoon, I read a little and the rest of the family cfacked hickory nuts, while thus engaged a small yearling heifer with a freshly brojken horn and along thin rope around its neck came into the garden followed by very bedraggled man in hip rubber boots and a small freckle faced youth. I found out he was rthe man from whom Jonas had purchased his heifer and that the above mentioned critter was her. As dad. had told Jonas that he might turn her in with our cows. FRank and I proceeded tp help him catch her, get the rope pff her and put her in the labe, but we found we had undertaken a task which we were incapable of performing, for the heifer was a swild as a deer. The man (Smith his name was) had already chased her ver nearly every road between here and Marburg, but she was still very game. Fist she jumped into the pig yard where I caught the trailing rope, but I might as well have had hold of an engine the rope was so small and wet and she was so small and wild that I was forced to let go, and then leaped over the fence and down the lane towards the road where Dav. the small boy headed her off, I opened the gate into the barn yard, hoping to get her cornered in there but she got from there into the pig yard, then nto the wheat field up the wheat feld into the gully down the gully fence to the sid eroad. then oveer the fence into the gully making straigt for th gapp n the blue grass field where I heade her off dfrom there and the three of us followed her up to the gully cross fence. (Dave. stayed back in the barn yeard), there the man caught the rope but let go again immediately, she jumped back in to the wjeat field and ran the while length of both wheat fields