“Thar ain’t no use of tryin’ to reach home on foot, any more than thar is of climbing up that wall with yer toes. Arter we strike camp, we’ll stop long enough to eat two or three bufflers, and rest, and while yer at that sort of biz, I’ll ’light out, and scare up something in the way of hoss flish. Thar’s plenty of it in this part of the world, and a man needn’t hunt long to find it. Are ye satisfied Mickey?”
The Irishman could not feel otherwise, and he expressed his profound obligations to the scout for the invaluable services he had already rendered them.
“Lone Wolf knows me,” said Sut, making a rather sudden turn in the conversation. “Me and him have had some tough scrimmages years ago, as I was tellin’ that ar Barnwell, or Big Fowl, rather, that has had the charge of starting the place called New Boston. I’ve got ’nough scars to remember him by, and he carries a few that he got from me. I have a style of sliding his warriors under, when I run a-foul of ’em, that Lone Wolf understands, and he’s larned long ago who it was that wiped out them two varmints that he sent out to look around arter me. Halloa! here we air!”
As he spoke, he reached a break in the continuity of the wall to which they had been clinging. The opening was somewhat similar to that into which Mickey and Fred had been driven in such a hurry, except that it was broader and the slope seemed more gradual.
Simpson turned abruptly to the left, and they began clambering upward. It took a considerable time to reach the level, and when they did so the scout led them back to the edge of the pass, which wound along fifty or a hundred feet below them.
“Thar’s whar we’ve come from,” said he, as they looked down in the moonlit gorge; “and while that’s mighty handy at times, yet it’s a bad place to get cotched in, as yer found out for yerselves.”
“No one will dispoot ye, Soot, especially when Lone Wolf and a score of spalpeens appears in front of ye, and whin ye turn about to lave, ye find him and a dozen more in your rear. That was a smart thrick was the same; but if he hadn’t showed himsilf in both places at the same time, we would have stood a chance of giving him the slip, as we had good horses under us.”
“Can’t always be sartin of that. Them varmints have ways of telegraphing ahead of ye to some of thar friends, so that ye’r’ll run heels over head into some trap, onless yer understands thar devilments and tricky ways.”
“When we were in camp,” said Fred, “we saw the smoke of a little fire near by. Was it yours?”
“It war,” replied Sut, with a curious solemnity. “I kindled that fire, and nussed it.”