“Mother must have been on the job then,” he said to himself, and smiled. “She said she’d put in a good word, and I guess she did! Surely, something besides me kept my head above water!”
Then another thought came to him. They were approaching the rapids with a mended canoe. The cattle were beyond, and rustlers were bent on taking them, if they had not already done so. There was the possible landslide that the stranger had reported.
“There’s plenty to worry about yet, I reckon,” Roy thought grimly. “But what good is worry? Answer—none! We’ll get those cattle, and we won’t come back till we do! Hey, Teddy!” he exclaimed aloud. “Snap to it! All right, boy—ho, ho ho, ho! Stick in there!”
CHAPTER XIX
The Whirlpool
Yes, there was still plenty to worry about, if one was in a worrying mood. The Manley boys and their companions were faced with the prospect of having their whole journey, with its dangers and hardships, go for nothing, if the rustlers reached the cattle first. There was a bare chance that Mr. Manley and his party had gotten to the Whirlpool River range in time to prevent the theft; but even Teddy admitted that this chance was a slim one. The overland route was long and tedious, and could not be accomplished in less than four days at the minimum.
“Guess we’d better resign ourselves to a long chase after those rustlers,” Roy said regretfully. “That is if they go through with their plan, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t. It sounded fool-proof to me. Certainly if the cattle were gone when dad got there, he would naturally suspect Jake Trummer of carrying out his threat and driving them into the river. Suppose we hadn’t heard the thieves talking that night? We would have gone on and probably backed dad up in saying Trummer had drowned the cows. When you think of it, we were pretty lucky after all.”
“But what good is our luck going to do us if we get there after the cattle are stolen?” Teddy asked, as he shifted his “paddle” to get a better grip on it.
“Seems to me I heered tell of a couple of fellers chasin’ some rustlers an’ makin’ out pretty well,” Pop drawled. “Could it have been you an’ Roy, Teddy?”
“Oh, that was different,” Teddy objected. “We got right on their trail then and rounded them up before they had a chance to escape. But now we won’t even know which way to start. They may take the cattle any place.”
“Can’t take ’em in the river an’ get much good out of ’em,” Bug Eye snickered. “They won’t drive ’em back toward X Bar X, ’cause you said they knew about yore dad comin’ along that trail. And as I remember it, there’s mountains back of Whirlpool River range that ’ud make travelin’ with a herd of dogies pretty risky—especially if the dirt on them hills is tearin’ loose. So it looks like there’s only one way they could go, Teddy—an’ that’s straight ahead.”