Reminded by the taunt of the clever trick that had been played upon them the night before, the Happy Family stiffened again into strained, waiting silence, their rifles aimed straight at the advancing objects. These, still vague in the first real darkness of early night, moved steadily in a scattered group behind a leader that was undoubtedly Johnny of the erstwhile tinkling bell. He circled the campfire just without its radius of light, so that they could not tell whether an Indian lay along his back, and beaded straight for the water-hole. The others followed him, and not one came into the firelight—a detail which sharpened the suspicions of the men crouched there in the edge of the bushes, and tingled their nerves with the sense of something sinister in the very unconcernedness of the animals.
They splashed into the water-hole and drank thirstily and long. They stood there as though they were luxuriating in the feel of more water than they could drink, and one horse blew the moisture from his nostrils with a sound that made Happy Jack jump.
After a few minutes that seemed an hour to those who waited with fingers crooked upon gun-triggers, the horse that looked vaguely like Johnny turned away from the water-hole and sneezed while he appeared to be wondering what to do next. He moved slowly toward the packs that were thrown down just where they had been taken from the horses, and began nosing tentatively about.
The others loitered still at the water-hole, save one—the buckskin, by his lighter look in the dark—that came over to Johnny. The two horses nosed the packs. A dull sound of clashing metal came to the ears of the Happy Family.
“Hey! Get outa that grain, doggone your fool hide,” Pink called out impulsively, crawling over his saddle and catching his foot in the stirrup leather so that he came near going headlong.
Applehead yelled something, but Pink had recovered his balance and was running to save the precious horsefeed from waste, and Johnny from foundering. There might have been two Indiana on every horse in sight, but Pink was not thinking of that possibility just then.
Johnny whirled guiltily away from the grain bag, licking his lips and blowing dust from his nostrils. Pink went up to him and slipped a rope around his neck. “Where's that bell?” he called out in his soft treble. “Or do you think we better tie the old son-of-a-gun up and be sure of him?”
“Aw,” said Happy Jack disgustedly a few minutes later, when the Happy Family had crawled out of their ambush and were feeling particularly foolish. “Nex' time old granny Furrman says Injuns t' this bunch, somebody oughta gag him.”
“I notice you waited till he'd gone outa hearing before you said that,” Luck told him drily. “We're going to put out extra guards tonight, just the same. And I guess you can stand the first shift, Happy, up there on the ridge—you're so sure of things!”