They left shortly after midnight, with Major Hurd’s dispatch tucked inside Terry’s shirt along with the General Dodge letters. The men of the wagon corral, except the sentries, were asleep, but Colonel Seymour had stayed up. He and the major shook hands with the two couriers.
“Good luck to you. We’ll depend on your sending that escort and opening the line again.”
“What was that General Dodge said? Boys are mighty handy, sometimes—wasn’t it?” George chuckled, as they rode away.
“That’s what,” agreed Terry. “But this is nothing. All we’ve got to do is to keep going—same as the railroad.”
“Can’t hurry, though, and kick up a fuss,” warned George. “Sure and steady, is the word, boy. We want to steer clear of those graders’ camps, too. They shoot first and ask questions afterward.”
“You bet.”
The plains before stretched wide and lonesome in spite of the railroad work. On either side of the survey stakes and the few graders’ camps it lay for hundreds of miles, by day broken with uplifts and ravines and ridges, but by night shrouded all in mystery, and looking all the same.
Above, the bright stars studded the black; below, there were no landmarks, except the upturned earth where the graders’ ploughs and picks and spades had followed the stakes. And frequently there was not even this, when the work had been interrupted or postponed.
The horses traveled, with ears pricked, at fast walk. Their hoofs occasionally clinked on a stone; and again were muffled in the sand and sod. The canteens now and then jingled, the saddle leather squeaked, one horse or the other blew snortingly. But the silence of the night, in such a country, was too big to be disturbed by such small noises.
However, with a good horse under him, and a Spencer repeating carbine across his saddle horn, and a stanch chum by his side, and a trail to which he was used, before him, a fellow need not feel afraid.