Moore's left side was plastered with mud, as was the left side of his mount.
"I was on guard and halfway up the far side," he said. "Split Ear took a header with me and delayed me some."
He pointed to the mud crusted on his clothes. Billie knew that he was the lone rider she had seen on the flanks of the herd as she rode away from the wagon. The fall accounted for their Founding the point ahead of him. Moore was looking off across the country.
"Do you mean to tell me you didn't see those two slickers flapping out in front?" he demanded.
"I confess I didn't observe any," Harris said. "You're getting spooky, Moore. A couple of white cows, likely, out ahead of the rest."
Moore regarded him curiously.
"Maybe that's so," he said. "Waving their tails in the air, sort of." He grinned and turned his horse to head back a bunch that had drifted out of the herd.
"The boys made a nice ride," Harris said to Horne. "You float round from one to the next and tell 'em we'll soon have a feed. I'll ride back and send the wagon up."
Billie rode with him as he skirted the herd and started on the return trip. Her mind was occupied with the two riders who had slowed the run and disappeared. There had been something familiar about them, for every man has his individual way of sitting a saddle as he has an individuality of gait when on foot. As she had viewed them in the lightning's flash they had closely resembled Bentley and Carp. But she decided that this resemblance had been but a fancied one, suggested by the fact that the two men had been much on her mind of late.
"We're not hurt bad," Harris said. "The boys held them bunched in good shape. Maybe forty or so head down with broken legs—and ten pounds of fat apiece run off the rest."