"Me and the roan just squatted down under a bank till the wind was over; then we made tracks for the ranch house ahead of the rain. Get soaked? Well, I should say! But somehow I didn't care to stay around where that blame black Satan disappeared hisself so strange-like. No, sir."
"Tom, I think you have been stringing the long bow," declared
Rhoda, shaking her head.
"Honest to pickles!" reiterated the cowboy. "Why—why, I'll show you the very hole in the hill where it happened."
They laughed at that; but the Eastern girls and Walter were inclined to believe that the cowboy had told the truth—as far as he knew it. In some way the outlaw had managed to elude him.
"Goodness!" murmured Walter to Nan, "wouldn't it be great to catch that black horse?"
"He's handsomer than your Prince," agreed Nan.
"He is that. I wonder where he went when Tom lost him?"
The treasure-hunting party did not go directly to the gulch in which the girls had had their adventure at the time of the tornado. A part of what Hesitation Kane had on his pack horse was to be delivered to an outfit herding a bunch of steers back in the hills a long distance.
The girls and Walter had agreed to ride that way, stop over night with Steve's outfit, and then work down to the old bear den from the other direction—that is, from the north.
They entered the foothills through a pleasant, winding valley which, had it not been for the marks of the recent cloudburst, would have been a beautiful trail. But it was considerably torn up by the water that had swept through it, a raging torrent.