“Oh dear!” Buddy and Brighteyes heard him say, for they could understand the man’s language, if they couldn’t talk it.  “Oh dear!  I’ve cut my foot on a sharp stone,” the man said, “and I don’t see how I can walk away over through the field and climb the hills after the cows.  Oh dear; this is bad luck, and it’s almost milking time, and the cows are sure to be away back in the far end of the pasture, and I can’t go after them.  I’ll call them, and maybe they’ll come to me, for I surely can’t walk after them.”

So the man stood up on one foot and called:  “Co Boss!  Co Boss!  Co Boss!  Co!  Co!  Co!” Then he waited quite some time, but the cows didn’t come, and he called again:  “Co Boss!  Co Boss!  Co Boss!” and he waited some more, but still the cows didn’t come.  “Oh, I guess I’ll have to go after them, no matter if I have cut my foot,” said the man at last, and he put on his shoe, though it hurt him, and he began to limp over the hilly field, very slowly and painfully.

All at once Brighteyes said to Buddy:  “Oh, Bud, that man is the farmer, and it’s his wife who gives us the buttermilk!  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do him a favor, and go and drive the cows home for him?”

“How, could we?” asked Buddy.  “The cows are big and we are little.  We never could drive them home.”

“We can try,” said Brighteyes cheerfully.  “Come, we’ll hurry on ahead of the farmer and perhaps I shall think of a plan.”

So the two little guinea pig children slipped under the fence and ran up across the hilly field, and the farmer, who was limping along, calling “Co Boss!” every once in a while, never saw them.  His foot was hurting him very much and he had to go slowly.

Well, Buddy and Brighteyes kept on, bounding over the stories and stopping now and then to eat some blackberries or huckleberries or raspberries or a few late, wild strawberries, and pretty soon they came to the back part of the field, where, resting in the shade of some trees, were all the cows.

Oh, I guess there was a dozen and a half of them—­big, nice mooley cows, with brown eyes and long tongues, and they were all chewing their cuds like gum, you know, and wondering why the farmer didn’t come to drive them home to milk, for they hadn’t heard him calling them, you see.

“How are we ever going to drive them home?” asked Buddy of his sister.

“Let me think a minute,” said Brighteyes, so she thought real hard for a minute, or, possibly a minute and a little longer, and then she exclaimed:  “We must each take a long, leafy tree branch, and go up behind the rows, and wave the branches, and tickle the cows with the leaves, and they’ll think it’s a boy driving them home, and they’ll march right along, and the poor farmer, with his sore feet, won’t have to come after them.”

And that’s exactly what Buddy and Brighteyes did.  They got some branches, gnawing them off a tree with their sharp teeth, and with the leaves they tickled the cows until they almost made them sneeze.