“Billy has been in Red Butte, figuring on a little mining deal in which we are both interested. But I am looking for him back to-night.”
“Good. If you should happen to see him when the train comes in, ask him to come over here and smoke a pipe with me. Tell him I’m losing my carefully acquired cowboy accent and I’d like to freshen it up a bit.”
The superintendent promised; and, since he always had work to do, went across to his office in the second story of the combined head-quarters and station building.
Some hour or so later the evening train came in from the west, and at the outpouring of passengers from it one, a man whose air of prosperous independence was less in the grave, young-old face and the loosely fitting khaki service clothes than in the way in which he carried his shoulders, was met by a boy from the superintendent’s office, and the word passed sent him diagonally across the grass-covered plaza to swing himself lightly over the railing of the hotel porch.
“Dick made motions as if you wanted to smoke a peace pipe with me,” he said, dropping carelessly into the chair which had been Maxwell’s.
“Yes,” Sprague assented; and then he went on to explain why. At the end of the explanation Starbuck nodded.
“I reckon we can do it all right; go up on the early-morning train to the canyon head, and take a chance on picking up a couple of bronc’s at Wimberley’s ranch. But we could hoof it over from Angels in less than a quarter of the time it’ll take us to ride up the river from Wimberley’s.”
“For reasons of my own, Billy, I don’t want to ‘hoof it,’ as you say, from Angels. To mention one of them, I might ask you to remember that I tip the scale at a little over the half of the third hundred, just now, and I’m pretty heavy on my feet.” And therewith the matter rested.
At an early hour the following morning, an hour when the sun was just swinging clear over the far-distant blue horizon line of the Crosswater Hills which marks the eastern limit of the great desert, two men dropped from the halted eastbound train at the Timanyoni Canyon water-tank and made their way around the nearest of the hogbacks to the ranch house of one William Wimberley.
As Starbuck had predicted, two horses were obtainable, though the ranchman looked long and dubiously at the big figure of the Government chemist before he was willing to risk even the heaviest of the horses in his small remuda.