They were standing just outside the door on the side of the cabin opposite to the one, where they had previously been sitting talking to the free-trader and his son. They were safe from detection here only for a few moments. As soon as Burnnel and Emery and “Rat” MacGregor’s wife put up their horses, they would enter the cabin. Then the boys would be seen, for not only the door but one window overlooked the space there on the west side of the house, where they were now standing.
Toma pointed to a line of brush two or three hundred yards away, and they proceeded hurriedly toward it. In leaving thus surreptitiously, they had been forced to abandon part of their equipment—their rifles and shoulder-packs, and a small roll of Hudson’s Bay blankets.
“What will Meade think?” Dick inquired anxiously, as they plunged into the dense thicket and commenced picking their way ahead. “He won’t understand our sudden disappearance. I’m afraid he’ll be anxious about us.”
“Worse than that,” Sandy struck out at a branch directly in front of him before taking his next step. “He’ll be sure to give us away. Emery and Burnnel, if they don’t know it already, will learn from him that we were at the road-house when they arrived.”
“It can’t be helped. I don’t think they’ll follow us.”
“What beats me,” Sandy stopped altogether and turned to face his two companions soberly, “is how they managed to get away from Corporal Rand. You don’t suppose he turned them loose again, do you?”
“It seems hardly likely, yet—” Dick paused.
“Yet they’re here,” the young Scotchman finished the sentence for him. “Either they escaped, or he gave them their freedom. If he gave them their freedom, Rand has proved to his own satisfaction that Frischette really committed suicide. Then, of course, he wouldn’t have any reason for detaining them any longer.”
“Perfectly true. But that doesn’t explain about the ponies. Rand may be kind-hearted and all that, yet he wouldn’t deliberately lend them the ponies, would he? We need them ourselves.”
“They might have stolen the ponies,” reasoned Sandy.