The three men with the girls and Walter were in rather a gloomy mood when they started off. Even Tom Collins seemed to have lost his spirits. To tell the truth, they were all deeply enough interested in the welfare of the ranch to feel depressed because of the money loss to Mr. Hammond.
Rhoda, however, would not allow her visitors to be overshadowed by this trouble for long. She possessed a good share of her father's cheerfulness and dry humor. She began to tell semi-humorous tales of her own experiences about the ranch and on the ranges, and this started Tom and Frank to swapping tales—some of them altogether too ridiculous to be wholly true.
Only Hesitation Kane remained silent; but that made him no different from usual. He even grinned cheerfully under the sallies of his companions.
About midday the little cavalcade wound around a knob of a hill and arrived at the brink of a sheer bank, below which was a pocket in the hillside. Tom Collins had been guiding them for more than an hour, and now he announced this was the place.
"This here's it," he said with confidence. "I run that black outlaw right up into this here pocket and—there he wasn't!"
"Oh, Tom!" demanded Rhoda, "are you sure this is the spot? A flea couldn't hide down there."
"Honest to pickles! I ain't fooling, Miss Rhody," said the cowpuncher earnestly. "When me and my roan come up this fur and seen we didn't see nothin', I was plumb twisted. Says I to me: 'Here, Tom Collins, is where you got to go an' see a spectacles man 'cause you got optical delusions' And I sure thought I had."
"I'd say nothing could get out of that hole, 'cept by the way it run in, 'ceptin' it had wings," said the other cowpuncher.
"Or get down into it, either," Nan Sherwood observed.
"Oh, yes. We can get down there. We'll make a path and do that little thing," Tom rejoined, getting out of his saddle.