Buffalo Bill turned in the saddle and interrupted him.
“That’s Nick Wharton’s expression,” he said, “and I know what you are going to say. You wish that old Nick was with us now, joining in the fun. This certainly would be an adventure after his own heart.”
“I guess he’ll be buttin’ into it before we get through,” Wild Bill remarked. “He was away at Fort Leavenworth a couple of weeks ago, so I heard, and he must have known we were around this yer section. I wouldn’t be surprised to run across him any moment.”
There is an English proverb that says: “Talk of angels, and you will hear the flutter of their wings.” There is also another, which runs: “Talk of the devil, and you will see his tail.” The truth of these two adages was speedily made clear to Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill.
They relapsed into silence, each thinking of their old friend, and rode forward over the prairie. They had not gone more than half a mile before they saw, through the darkness, which was illumined only by the pale light of the stars, a figure on horseback spurring toward them at a terrific pace.
Instinctively they grasped their rifles and made ready for anything that might happen.
In a few moments the figure drew up alongside, and they saw from its ungainliness and general tattered and dilapidated appearance that it was none other than that of their old friend Nick Wharton, of whom they had just been speaking.
He was riding his old mare, who, as he often said, was “not much to look at, but a holy terror to go.”
She was certainly tearing along at a great pace, but as she reached the two scouts she stopped dead short and reared up on her haunches.