“Maybe we are and maybe we ain’t. Maybe we’re going to see our best girls. What’s it to you?” Pink turned his back on Cal and looked full at Weary. “Come on—the girls will be plumb wild if we don’t get a move on,” he said carelessly, and picked up his bridle. “Where’s Andy? I thought he said he wanted to go along. Hurry up, Mig, if you’re going.”
Nobody knew what he was driving at, but the three were mounted well within ten minutes, and flinging back remarks to the four who had lately returned. The departing ones were well up on the hogback before any one of them ventured to question Pink, who rode with the air of one whose destination is fixed, and whose desire outstrips his body in the journey.
“Say, Cadwolloper, where are we headed for?” Weary inquired then resignedly. “And what’s the rush?”
Pink glanced down the hill toward the stable and corrals, decided that they were being observed with something very like suspicion, and faced to the front again. “We’re going to head for Rogers’,” he dimpled, “but we ain’t going to get there. Yuh needn’t look down there—but Irish and Cal are saddling up again. They’re afraid we’re going to town. They’re going to trail us up and find out for sure.”
“They sure did act like they’d been holding up a train, when they rode up,” Weary observed. “I’ve been searching my soul with a spyglass trying to find the answer for all that guilt on their faces.”
“Happy Jack has been mentioning stuffed olives and moonlight pretty often to-day,” the Native Son remarked with apparent irrelevance. “I thought he’d pickled that josh, but he’s working things up again. Two and two make four; that four.” With the slightest of head tilts he indicated those below, and flashed his even, white teeth in a smile. “Do you want me to guess where you’re going, Pink?”
“I wish you fellows would guess how we’re going to ditch them two pirates, first,” Pink retorted, glancing down again at the stable without turning his head. “If we strike straight for Rogers’, maybe they’ll turn back, though. They’ll think we’ve gone over there to see the girls.”
“If I knew the country a little better—” began the Native Son, and stopped with that.
“If they don’t follow us over the ridge,” spoke up Andy, who had been thinking deeply, “we can go up Antelope Coulee instead of down, and follow along in the edge of the breaks to the head of One Man, and down that; that’s where you’re going, isn’t it? It will be five or six miles farther.”
Pink threw up his hand impatiently. “Uh course, that’s what I intended to do. But if they ride over the ridge they’ll know we never kept straight on to Rogers’, and then they’ll know we’re dodging.” He urged his horse up the last steep slope, and led the way over the brow of the bluff and out of sight of the ranch below. “And I’m sure going to find out what that bunch has been making themselves so mysterious about, the last couple uh days,” he vowed grimly. “I slipped up on ’em yesterday down in the hay corral, and I heard Cal say, ‘Sure, we can! There’s one in that Injun grave over in Antelope Coulee.’” He stared at the others with purpling eyes. “What’s in that grave, Weary? I never was right to it, myself.”