“No,” he replied. “Guy would have to have a big camp fire, an easy chair, and a package of cigarettes if he was going to sit up that late out in the hills. Jake’s the best for that sort of work.”
“Guy isn’t a bit like you, is he?” she asked. “He’s lived right here and led the same sort of life, and yet he doesn’t seem to be a part of it, as you are.”
“Guy’s a dreamer, and he likes to be comfortable all the time,” laughed Custer. “They’re all that way a little. Mr. Evans was, so father says. He died while we were all kids. Mrs. Evans likes to take it easy, too, and even Grace wasn’t much on roughing it, though she could stand more than the others. None of them seemed to take to it the way you do. I never saw any one else but a Pennington such a glutton for a saddle and the outdoors as you are. I don’t like ’em any the less for it,” he hastened to add. “It’s just the way people are, I guess. The taste for such things is inherited. The Evanses, up to this generation, all came from the city; the Penningtons all from the country. Father thinks that horsemen, if not the descendants of a distinct race, at least spring from some common ancestors who inhabited great plains and were the original stock raisers of the human race. He thinks they mingled with the hill and mountain people, who also became horsemen through them; but that the forest tribes and the maritime races were separate and distinct. It was the last who built the cities, which the horsemen came in from the plains and conquered.”
“But perhaps Guy would like the adventure of it,” she insisted. “It might give him material for a story. I’m going to ask him.”
“Please don’t. The less said about it the better, for if it’s talked about it may get to the men I want to catch. Word travels fast in the country. Just as we don’t know who these men are or what they are doing, neither do we know but what some of them may be on friendly terms with our employees, or the Evanses, or yours.”
The girl made no reply.
“You won’t mention it to him, please?” Custer insisted.
“Not if you don’t wish it,” she said.
They were silent for a time, each absorbed in his or her own thoughts. The girl was seeking to formulate some plan that would prevent a meeting between Custer and Allen’s confederates, who she was sure were the owners of the mysterious pack train; while the man indulged in futile conjectures as to their identity and the purpose of their nocturnal expeditions.
“That trail above Jackknife Cañon is the key to the whole business,” he declared presently. “I’ll just lay low until after next Friday night, so as not to arouse their suspicions, and then, no matter what I find out, I’ll ride that trail to its finish, if it takes me clear to the ocean!”