"They aren't giving you much rest," sympathised Stamford.
"Naw," replied Bean shortly.
"The work about a ranch is certainly a surprise to me. What does Dakota want you for?"
"It's a hell of a life!" grumbled Bean. Thereafter he kept his lips closed.
An hour later Stamford was eating in the ranch-house, trying to answer with intelligent flippancy the questions poured at him. The promise of the stable key burning a hole in his pocket was filling his mind. To outwit Dakota was his sole ambition at the moment. If he could get Hobbles from the locked stables——
Pleading fatigue, he retired early. For some time he heard the conversation in the sitting-room, subdued for his sake, and then the stair door closed behind the Bulkeleys. The sudden Western night had fallen.
CHAPTER XIV
RIDERS OF THE NIGHT
Stamford, softly lifting the screen from his window, with the thrills of a conspirator, climbed through and looked about. Once before he had stood in the midst of the darkened prairie, with no thought then than that he was temporarily but not dangerously lost. What lay before him now he thought he had seen under every aspect from his bedroom window. But there was a difference—a very disturbing difference.
Now, in the eeriest part of the vast prairies he was stepping into an eery and illegitimate adventure. Deliberately he was involving himself in a situation that could bring no satisfaction but that of counter-plotting, and, were he discovered, would expose him to even worse suspicion than he deserved. Most of the exhilaration fled with the touch of the cold night air on his face; the rest of it went before the vividness of his imagination. He marvelled that a mere key should have uplifted him so much, that a prospective ride at such an hour should have gratified one to whom riding was at best nothing more than an unpleasant education.