"He is afraid that I will ask him to assist me in making my escape," thought the boy, and he made a pretty shrewd guess as to the cause of the man's sudden disappearance. "Well, who cares? If they are going to allow me to run around as I please, I'll not ask help of any body. I wonder what they have done with my horse?"
George answered this question for himself by directing his course toward the room into which he had seen Ranger led the night before. The animal was still there. He greeted his master with a low whinny of recognition, and rubbed his head familiarly against his shoulders when the boy patted his glossy neck. He tried to follow George, too, when the latter went out, but he was tied to a ring in the wall, and his master dared not set him at liberty.
"I am afraid that our days of companionship are over, Ranger," said George, as he put his hands into his pockets and sauntered toward the gate. "Fletcher seems to think that I can't get away from here if he keeps you tied up. But there are other horses close at hand, some of them as good as you are, probably, and I must take one of them."
There was no one at the gate to stop him, and George went through it, and turning around an angle of the wall bent his steps towards the place where the horses belonging to the guerrillas were grazing, walking slowly and stopping now and then to look about him as if he had determined upon nothing in particular. He did not know how many pairs of eyes there might be watching him, and he was careful to do nothing to excite the suspicions of his guard, if he had any. He moved leisurely around the building and then went back through the gate and lay down upon his blanket, which he had spread in front of the room that had served him and his captors for a sleeping apartment. His short walk outside the walls had satisfied him that unless some restraint was put upon his actions his captivity would be of very short duration. If he could leave the rancho after dark, it would be no trouble at all for him to capture one of the horses that were feeding on the plain, and set out for the nearest ford. He resolved that he would attempt it that very night.
George made three or four more excursions outside the rancho that afternoon, each time going a little farther away from the building than before, and when he came in from his last ramble he had been gone two hours, and Fletcher was looking for him.
"O, here you are," he exclaimed, as George approached him. "I reckoned that perhaps you had skipped out."
The man said this with a grin which made George believe that perhaps his escape could not be accomplished so easily after all. It told him as plainly as words that he was watched.
"Skipped out!" repeated George, "I guess not. I have no desire to be shut up in one of these rooms with a guard over me."
"I saw you looking at the horses," continued Fletcher. "Did you notice that fellow with the white mane and tail, and four white feet?"
Yes, George had noticed him, and with the eye of a horseman, too. The animal would have been conspicuous for his beauty in a drove of thoroughbreds; and among the shaggy, ill-conditioned beasts that the guerrillas owned, he looked like a well-dressed gentleman surrounded by a crowd of ragamuffins.