The men hastened toward the yard, where lanterns were moving about the car of the train-guards near the Blue Front stables. The loading board had been lowered, and the horses were being carefully led into the car. From a switch engine behind the car a shrill cloud of steam billowed 261 into the air. Across the yard a great passenger engine, its huge white side-rod rising and falling slowly in the still light of the moon––one of the mountain racers, thick-necked like an athlete and deep-chested––was backing down for the run with the single car almost across the west end of the division. Trainmen were running to and from the Wickiup platform. By the time the horses were loaded the conductor had orders. Until the last minute, Whispering Smith was in consultation with McCloud, and giving Dancing precise instructions for the posse into the Cache country. They were still talking at the side door of the car, McCloud and Dancing on the ground and Whispering Smith squatting on his haunches inside the moving car, when the engine signalled and the special drew away from the chute, pounded up the long run of the ladder switch, and moved with gathering speed into the canyon. In the cab Charlie Sollers, crushing in his hand the tissue that had brought the news of his brother’s death, sat at the throttle. He had no speed orders. They had only told him he had a clear track.
CHAPTER XXVII
PURSUIT
Brill Young picked up a trail Sunday morning at Tower W before the special from Medicine Bend reached there. The wrecked express car, which had been set out, had no story to tell. “The only story,” said Whispering Smith, as the men climbed into their saddles, “is in the one from the hoofs, and the sooner we get after it the better.”
The country around Tower W, which is itself an operating point on the western end of the division, a mere speck on the desert, lies high and rolling. To the south, sixty miles away, rise the Grosse Terre Mountains, and to the north and west lie the solitudes of the Heart range, while in the northeast are seen the three white Saddle peaks of the Missions. The cool, bright sunshine of a far and lonely horizon greets the traveller here, and ten miles away from the railroad, in any direction, a man on horseback and unacquainted with the country would wish himself––mountain men 263 will tell you––in hell, because it would be easier to ride out of.
To the railroad men the country offered no unusual difficulties. The Youngs were as much at home on a horse as on a hand car. Kennedy, though a large and powerful man, was inured to hard riding, and Bob Scott and Whispering Smith in the saddle were merely a part––though an important part––of their horses; without killing their mounts, they could get out of them every mile in their legs. The five men covered twenty miles on a trail that read like print. One after another of the railroad party commented on the carelessness with which it had been left. But twenty miles south of the railroad, in an open and comparatively easy country, it was swallowed completely up in the tracks of a hundred horses. The railroad men circled far and wide, only to find the herd tracks everywhere ahead of them.
“This is a beautiful job,” murmured Whispering Smith as the party rode together along the edge of a creek-bottom. “Now who is their friend down in this country? What man would get out a bunch of horses like this and work them this hard so early in the morning? Let’s hunt that man up. I like to meet a man that is a friend in need.”
Bob Scott spoke: “I saw a man with some 264 horses in a canyon across the creek a few minutes ago, and I saw a ranch-house behind those buttes when I rode around them.”