“If he is alive, what else can he be?”
“He was well mounted and might have escaped on horseback.”
“If that had been the case,” added the elder Texan, “we couldn’t have helped knowing it.”
“But there was no noise when Eph met the Apaches except the report of his pistol.”
“We have been listening so closely here, except when I was asleep, that we noticed the tramp of the Apaches’ ponies even when they were walking; if Nick rode off at full speed we must have heard the sounds, because they would have been much louder.”
“Suppose on leaving the building, during Eph’s interview with the two men, he had ridden around to the rear and galloped several miles to the westward, would you have heard Jack’s hoofs?”
“Thar’s somethin’ in that,” remarked the trapper; “you’re all pretty sharp-eared, but that would have been too much for you to catch.”
“The supposition, however, is a very thin one,” insisted Strubell, to whom the action of Nick Ribsam was very annoying.
“I’m sorry he did it,” remarked Herbert, “but we must take things as they are, and when we meet him we’ll haul him over the coals.”