CHAPTER XLI.
THE FIGHT IN THE SLEUTHS’ CAMP.
Several days passed away, and Buffalo Bill was absent from the camp, for, acting under his orders, Texas Jack had encamped his men outside of the hacienda and away from its immediate surroundings.
The chief of scouts was what the men called “playing a little game,” in this, for it could give those who haunted the hacienda the idea that the scout sleuths were afraid to stay there any longer.
The truth was that Buffalo Bill was on a still hunt of detective work, and each one of his men was aiding him all in his power.
The scout had not been gone a day from the camp before visitors began to drop in there, a thing that had never happened while they were at the hacienda.
Just how it happened Texas Jack and his men did not know, or if they did they kept it to themselves; but trouble came, and at night, when the scouts were away from the camp.
Blue Jacket Bob and Rio Grande Dick were the two men left in camp, and following the arrival of three strangers came a fatal fight.
To the surprise of Blue Jacket Bob, two of the cowboy visitors were from the ranch of Señor Otega, and the other was from the hacienda of the fair hermit, and known to belong to the band who served the cowboy king, the Señorita Suelo’s chief of cowboys.
Perhaps they had expected to find only one guard at the cowboy camp and rob it; but the two men they found there had proven more than a match for them.