Sprague had unlimbered and focussed his camera again and was calmly taking snap-shot after snap-shot: of the dam, of the impounded lake, of the up-coming mob, and of the black-bearded man held hands-up in the middle of the camp street. When he shut the box on the last of the exposures he turned to Starbuck with a whimsical smile wrinkling at the corners of his eyes.
“They don’t seem to be very enthusiastic about keeping us here, Billy,” he said, with gentle irony. “Shall we go?”
Starbuck shook the reins over the neck of his mount and the two horses wheeled as one and sprang away down the rough cart-road leading to the end of the copper-mine spur above Angels. At the retreat, some one on the commissary porch began to pump a repeating rifle in the general direction of the pair, but no harm was done.
Starbuck was the first to break the galloping silence when an intervening hill shoulder had cut off the backward view of the camp at the dam, and what he said was purely complimentary.
“You sure have got your nerve with you, and the punch to back it up,” he chuckled. “I reckon I’m goin’ to wake up in the middle of the night laughin’ at the way you snatched that rustler out of his tracks and slammed him across the saddle. I’d give a heap to be able to do a thing like that; I sure would.”
“Call it a knack,” rejoined Sprague modestly. “You pick up a good many of those little tricks when you’re training on the squad. Perhaps you’ve never thought of it, but the human body is easier to handle, weight for weight, than any inanimate object could possibly be. That is one of the first things you learn in tackling on the foot-ball field.”
They were jogging along slowly by this time and had passed the copper-mine switch on the road leading to the station at Angels. Starbuck was not over-curious, but the experiences of the forenoon were a little puzzling. Why had his companion wished to take the long, hard ride up the valley of the Timanyoni? And why, again, had he taken the chance of a fight for the sake of securing a few snap-shot pictures of the irrigation company’s construction camp and dam? A third query hinged itself upon the decidedly inhospitable, not to say hostile, attitude of Jennings, the irrigation company’s field-officer. Why should he object so strenuously to the common sight-seer’s habit of kodaking anything and everything in sight?
Starbuck was turning these things over in his mind when they reached Angels. As they rode into town Sprague glanced at his watch.
“I have been wondering if we couldn’t get this man Dickery at the town corral to take charge of these horses of ours until Wimberley can come and get them?” he said. “That would make it possible for us to catch the eleven-thirty train for Brewster.”
Starbuck said it was quite feasible, and by the time they had disposed of the horses the train was whistling for the station. When they boarded the train, Sprague proposed that they postpone the mid-day meal in the diner in order to ride out on the rear platform of the observation-car.