He went out; and, as they heard him ride away, the trooper, wriggling round, looked up.
"Can you get out?" he said.
"Yes," said Gallwey; "I think I could, though it's rather more than probable that I shall fall over in attempting it. Under the circumstances, half a mile an hour would, I fancy, be an excellent pace."
"Still, you've got to try it," said the trooper. "Get up right away, and go for the Sergeant."
Gallwey endeavoured to do so, managing to get out of the door before the rope jerked him off his feet. He fell over a good many times descending the coulee, stopping to rest for a minute or two on each occasion. Still he persevered, and made some progress. Dawn was in the sky when a farmer caught sight of him. He and his companions had just decided that Leland's informant had deceived him, or that the rustlers had gone another way, after all, when a weird figure moved out of the gloom beneath the bluff. They could not see it clearly, for there was only a faint grey light as yet, but it seemed to be moving in a most extraordinary fashion. "Well," said one of them, "I never saw a man walk quite like that. It is a man, anyway. There aren't any bears on the prairie."
He broke off abruptly, for the mysterious object toppled over and vanished altogether.
"It might have crawled into a hole," said another man. "No, the blamed thing's getting up again. Anyway, it's like a man. I'm going along."
They all went together. A few minutes later, they came upon Gallwey sitting in the grass. He had lost his hat, and there was a good deal of dust and grass and leaves on him. He sat still, smiling somewhat feebly.
"I don't suppose my appearance is exactly prepossessing, but that's not my fault, and I'm unusually pleased to see you, boys," he said. "As you may have surmised, the Sergeant's little plan didn't quite work out as it should have done. I'll try to tell you about it if you'll take these ropes off."
Sergeant Grier, coming up at this juncture, made several observations that are unrecordable, but after the first outbreak, he put a check on his temper.