“If it’s all the same to you, Star, maybe you’d be just as happy a little farther back. Hey? Easy, now—there’s no rush. Let’s not do anything sudden. Easy! That’s the stuff. Whew!”
Pushing back his sombrero, Roy mopped his forehead.
Then he dismounted and walked forward, to part the bushes and investigate the canyon before him.
“She’s deep, all right, and wide,” he mused. “Not a chance to jump it—here, at any rate. Funny I don’t remember this. Well—”
He shook his head jerkily, in the gesture of a person casting an unpleasant thought from him. Walking swiftly to where he had left Star, he remounted and started silently to follow the canyon. Turning from side to side, so that he might not miss Teddy if the boy were in that vicinity, Roy, glancing to the south, away from the gully, gave a start. In the distance, far up the mountain, he could see the figure of a man on horseback.
“Teddy!” he yelled, then the next moment regretted it. That was not Teddy. He rode differently, slouched to one side. Quickly Roy moved out of sight behind a bush and peered through. The man was gone. Roy could not tell whether he had heard his hail or not.
“Jimminy! he looked familiar.” The boy was puzzled. “I’ve seen a rider just like that somewhere. I wonder if—” Then he smiled to himself at the absurdity of it. The rustlers they had captured were in jail at Hawley. That fellow who had wanted to shoot Froud for knifing his friend Brand was certainly behind bars.
“It couldn’t have been him up there! Yet that slouch and the queer way he held his shoulders!”
Roy had not known how vividly the picture of that night had been impressed in his memory. The ride to the north fence—the long wait—then the coming of the rustlers with Froud leading them and the others following, among them one with that strange slouch. No, Roy had not consciously marked the peculiarity of that side-riding horseman. Yet now, when he saw one who recalled the scene, he pictured the rider almost as vividly as if he were before his eyes.
Keenly the boy swept the mountain top with his gaze, but the puncher had disappeared. Roy shrugged his shoulders.