Sam Hogg arose from his hiding place and growled: “The dirty skunk!”
“Who? Him or tother?” Tad asked.
Ten minutes later Kennedy and Ace Cutts rode down the street. The moment they had passed the judge’s house they put their horses into a wild, scrambling run.
Sam Hogg smiled grimly, then, drawing his gun from his holster, he fired three times in the air.
CHAPTER VIII
KIDNAPED
The attack had come so suddenly that Snippets McPherson hardly realized what was happening before she was roughly seized and hoisted to a horse in front of a masked man. She had uttered only one shrill scream, for common sense told her it was better to obey her captor than to risk his carrying out his threat of choking her. She realized that the single shot—the one which hit Dutchy—would raise the alarm.
So she remained passive. The thing that worried her more than her own situation was Dutchy’s fate. She was sure he had been badly hurt, for she knew the old gunman would never cease firing as long as he had strength to pull a trigger.
She marked the course they were traveling. It was almost due east. They followed the trail to the Frying Pan and Bar X for about five miles, then left it to take a course south. They twisted in and out of the brush, slid down banks and scrambled up sheer slides.
Snippets estimated that they were about ten miles from town when she was transferred to a waiting buckboard. As she was driven away in this, she heard the mooing of cattle and the shouts of men, and she knew that the cattle were being driven across their trail to hide it. There were two men in the buckboard with her. She sat on the driver’s seat with one, while another knelt in the rear. Suddenly the man behind her dropped a sack over her head which blinded her completely. Even breathing was difficult.
A half hour later she was lifted from the buckboard and carried into a house. The sack was removed and she found herself in a perfectly bare room. One of the men carried a flickering lantern; by its light she sized up her two captors. She had never seen either of them before. One was tall and thin, with a drooping mustache, and the other was a short, powerfully built Mexican.