Had his knees not trembled he would probably have climbed back through the window with a grin of shame at his foolhardiness, but with terror tingling his scalp—— He closed his teeth and struck out stubbornly round the corner of the house, avoiding the noisy gravel walk. Up the slope diagonally he crept, pointing above the stables. A sense of the necessity of concealment, and a dim thought of future needs, impressed him so strongly that he scouted about for a long time back and forth in search of the deepest of the scarcely visible rolls he knew to mark the prairie everywhere.
Dropping down the slope then from above the stables, he applied the key to the padlock. His heart was beating fast, his fingers trembling. The night was crammed with terrors, and anxiety about the fit of the key made him wonder what kink in his brain clothed an adventure like this in attraction.
The key fitted. He realised then that there was no honourable escape but to go on. Fate was a funny thing. He looked back once toward his window in the ranch-house, took a long breath, and stepped into the utter blackness of the stable. The horses sniffed, and for a moment he tried to convince himself that he had accomplished all he wished.
He knew Hobbles' stall, and, speaking gently, advanced in the darkness. By the light of a sulphur match which he struck under the cover of his coat he found saddle and bridle and clumsily fastened them in place. Once off the wooden floors, the horse's feet met only hard, soundless clay, and when he emerged into the night, leading Hobbles, he was satisfied that he could not have wakened the cookie, who alone, he thought, remained in the ranch buildings. Pushing back the loop of the padlock without locking it, he led off to the south-east, avoiding bunk-house and ranch-house.
In the saddle he was more satisfied. No longer was he alarmed, but the exhilaration of exercising a new art alone in the night determined him on one burst of speed. Stopping suddenly at the end of a few hundred yards, he turned his ear back with tingling veins. Back there somewhere in the darkness he imagined the beat of a horse's hoofs—and then sudden silence. Twice more he repeated it with the same result.
Convinced now that he was really frightened into foolish fancies, he rode on.
Out before him a strange lightness in the sky attracted his attention. Five minutes later he could see dimly the lines of dead grass on the crest of a ridge. Riding slowly up a slope, he looked over.
Four hundred yards away, in a deep coulee, a fire was burning. The bottom in which it was kindled was carefully chosen for concealment, and Stamford thrilled with excitement. Between him and the flames a bunch of cattle was kept in hand by a temporary corral, two silhouetted cowboys seated on the top rail. About the fire more cowboys were struggling with a steer that lay on its side, and the smell of burning hair carried to Stamford's nose the work of the branding irons.
He wondered what mystic night rites he was invading.
Seeking a nearer approach than was possible from that direction, he rode back down the slope and skirted about to the opposite side. That side, the south, suited him better, too, for the reason that, if he were detected, he would not seem to have come from the ranch.