“But why didn’t he know that I wasn’t White-horse Fred as soon as he looked into my face?” thought the boy, so nearly overcome with terror that he did not hear the words that had been addressed to him. “And how does it happen that I was riding Fred’s horse? How did my uncle come by him? I can’t understand it?”
“Speak quick!” repeated Smirker, savagely, “and don’t try to draw no weapons. Who are you?”
He pulled back the hammer of his pistol with the thumb of his right hand as he spoke, and shifting his left from Julian’s collar to the butt of the revolver which the boy was on the point of pulling from his belt.
“Who should I be?” returned Julian boldly. “If I’ve no business here how came I by that horse I brought you? That’s what I’d like to know.”
“And if that fellow out there ain’t White-horse Fred how did he give Fred’s whistle so exact, and how did he come by Fred’s clothes? That’s what I’d like to know.”
It was plain, both from Smirker’s tone and manner, that he began to believe that he had been a little too hasty. He let go Julian’s pistol, lowered the hammer of his own weapon, and stood gazing at our hero with an expression of great bewilderment on his face.
“Wouldn’t it be a good plan to ask him?” suggested Julian.
Smirker thought it would. He jerked open the door of the stable, and Julian, who was on the point of dashing his spurs into his horse and riding over the robber and making good his escape, found his way blocked up by a dashing young fellow, who rode gayly into the stable, but stopped short on discovering Julian, and checked the words of greeting that arose to his lips. For fully a minute no one spoke. The two boys sat on their horses staring at one another, and Smirker, after closing and locking the door, took his stand between them, looking first at the new-comer and then at Julian, apparently unable to come to any decision concerning them.
The strange equestrian was a youth about Julian’s age and size, only a little more robust, and had the two been dressed alike it would have been a matter of some difficulty for any one to tell them apart. Julian looked as if he had just come out of a lady’s bandbox, while the new-comer seemed to have bestowed but little care upon his toilet that morning. His dress consisted of a red flannel shirt, open at the throat and worn without a coat, coarse trowsers, which were thrust into a pair of high-top boots, and a broad-brimmed hat. A belt encircled his waist, supporting a knife on one side and a revolver on the other. He rode a small Indian pony, which, judging by its appearance, had been driven long and rapidly.
“Now, then,” said Smirker, who was the first to recover the use of his tongue, “one of you two fellows has got himself in the worst kind of a scrape—one that he will never get out of alive. Which is White-horse Fred?”