“You’re not a low-down fellow, Banjo. Don’t be calling yourself names.”
“I was low-down enough to believe what they told me about Macdonald shootin’ up Chance Dalton. I believed it till Missus Mathews give me the straight 242 of it. One of them Injun police fellers told her how that job was put up, and how it failed to work.”
“A man named Lassiter told me about it.”
They rode along in silence a long time after that. Then Banjo—
“Well, I hope we don’t bust out onto them cavalry fellers too sudden and meet a flock of bullets. I’d never forgive the man that put a bullet through my fiddle.”
“We’ll go slowly, and keep listening; I can tell cavalry from cowboys as far as I can hear.”
“I bet a purty you can, brought up with ’em like you was.”
“They’ll not be able to do anything before daylight, and when we overtake them we’ll ride around and get ahead while they’re waiting for morning. I don’t know where the homesteaders are, but they’ll be sending out scouts to locate them, and we can watch.”
They were following the road that the cavalry had taken an hour in advance of them. Listening now, they rode on without words. Now and then a bush at the roadside flipped a stirrup, now and again Banjo’s little horse snorted in short impatience, as if expressing its disapproval of this journey through the dark. Night was assertive in its heaviness, but communicative of its mysteries in its wild scents—the silent music of its hour.
There are those who, on walking in the night, can tell the hour by the smell, the taste, the elusive fine 243 aroma of the quiet air. Before midnight it is like a new-lit censer; in the small hours the smell of old camp fires comes trailing, and the scent of rain upon embers.