It was a great mystery to these two friends, not only how Archie had managed to possess himself of a horse which nearly every officer stationed at the Fort had tried in vain to purchase, but also how he had happened to hear of him. It was their intention to keep his existence a profound secret. It was a question in their minds, too, whether or not Archie knew what a prize he had secured; and in order to settle their doubts on this point, they mounted their horses and rode out to watch his movements.
“I am satisfied now,” said the lieutenant, when he and Frank had witnessed two of the three races that came off. “If Archie didn’t know that the horse was fast when he bought him, he certainly knows it by this time. It is all up with you, my boy.”
“I shouldn’t mind being beaten,” said Frank, “only I have crowed over Archie a good deal, and he will pay me back a thousand fold. No one can beat him at that.”
“There’s no way to avoid it, that I can see, unless you catch that wild horse of father’s. That would be a feather in your cap and money in your pocket. The race will take place to-morrow, I suppose.”
“I suppose so,” replied Frank.
But, as it happened, the race did not come off the next day, nor in fact on any day. An unlooked-for incident which happened that night saved Frank from defeat.
“Well, Archie,” said Eugene, at the conclusion of the third race, during which the new steed, which was plainly growing tired of the sport, took the bits in his teeth and made a persevering attempt to run away with Featherweight, who was riding him, “if you never had a good horse before you’ve got one now, and Mr. Nelson will have to take a back seat, sure.”
“But we don’t want to run him against the black to-day,” said Fred. “He’s getting tired. We don’t want to go back to camp either, for there’s nothing interesting going on there; so how shall we pass the afternoon?”
“I don’t know any better way than to follow up those antelopes again, if we can find them,” said Eugene. “Perhaps we may succeed in bagging one of them.”
This was the way the boys had passed a good portion of the week that had elapsed since the occurrence of the events at Potter’s rancho. Archie knew something about antelope, and the manner of hunting them practised by the hunters of the prairies, and he had been initiating his friends into the mysteries of the sport. We mean by this that he had showed them how to attract the attention and excite the curiosity of the timid animals, by moving above the grass a red handkerchief attached to the muzzle of a rifle; but he had not yet shown them how to shoot one, for the simple reason that the antelope, having been hunted and shot at by the officers and soldiers of the fort until their numbers had been pretty well thinned out, had become so wild and wary that Archie could never induce them to come within reach of his Maynard, which would have been sure death to one of them at six hundred yards. So in pursuit of the antelope the boys went; and the fact that during the whole of the afternoon they saw not the first sign of the game, did not dampen their ardor or detract from the pleasure of the brisk gallop they enjoyed. Neither would it in any way have marred their sport had they known that there was an eye watching all their movements; that it followed them in all their windings and turnings, and that when they rode into camp at dark, the owner of it was not more than two hundred yards behind them.