“I can furnish you a horse, Cody,” he said. “I beg your pardon if I’ve been wrong, and I hope I’m not wrong now. It all seems strange. I wish I could do more, Cody; but you may have a horse, and as many of them as you want.”
So much delay had resulted that it seemed almost like making the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack when Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill rode forth from Fort Cimarron in pursuit of Lieutenant Barlow. With them went the young cowboy, Ben Stevens.
“I’ll follow him to the ends of the earth!” said Stevens; “and when I find him it’s his life or mine! This world ain’t big enough to hold the two of us from this on!”
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE SKY MIRROR.
With the aid of torches, an effort was made to pick up the trail close by the fort.
The scouts found some hoofmarks, and from them gained what they believed to be the general direction of Barlow’s flight.
It was known, however, that Barlow was shrewd, and the chances were good that he would change his course after leaving the fort some distance behind him.
When daylight came nothing was to be seen by the scouts but the broad expanse of prairie grass lying before them.
In that section of country the grass is not the tall prairie grass of better-watered regions; but it is the short “buffalo grass,” growing but an inch or two high. It is fine and mossy in texture and of a gray-green in color, and when the land is clothed with it the traveler looks out on a gray-green expanse that widens before him like a limitless carpet.
Here and there a few “groves,” or patches of mesquite, a bush of the size of a small peach tree, broke the otherwise illimitable sweep of the eye.