The scout slipped from his saddle and walked up the gorge for a few rods.
Then he returned and said:
“They have not passed out of here.”
Hickok whistled. “What do you make of that?” he asked.
“Well, they had not more than five or eight minutes’ start of us, and we have ridden hard; we may have gained something on them in two hours’ riding.”
“Correct. Suppose we ride up the cañon a piece, and then dismount, and give the horses a chance to blow?”
“It’s a good notion, Hickok. I think we have those fellows jugged. I am confident if Nick and Cayuse are not too badly wounded that Price and his man will never get by them. I should sooner think they would find some favorable angle in the gorge where they are screened by the rocks and make a stand, believing we are all behind them in the cañon.”
“As we would have been if it hadn’t been for the shrewd head of one W. F. Cody, in the service of Uncle Sam.”
The scout gave no heed to the praise of his pard, but rode up the cañon, studying carefully the odd formation and the opportunities for scaling the sides.
“Do you remember our little climb in the cañon behind Fremont’s Peak?” he asked of the Laramie man.