Chick Billings stooped down and picked up his lines.
“G’lang, ye pack o’ buzzards!” he spat out at the horses. “Git us out o’ hyer in a hurry, or I’ll be cuttin’ loose an’ makin’ a fool o’ myself.”
Snap, snap went the whip about the leaders’ ears, and the four-horse team bounded away.
Agreeably to orders, no one looked backward; but the final words of the scoundrelly Lawless followed them:
“Buffalo Bill is in Sun Dance. Tell him how Captain Lawless made his clean-up; and tell him that if he wants to follow me and my men, and make a clean-up of his own, we’re only too anxious for him to try!”
What those in the wagon thought was not made known. Hotchkiss, Lonesome Pete, and Chick Billings were furious; Reginald de Bray was quiet and filled with a strange calm; the woman was crying softly in her hands.
The trail made a curve at that point, to avoid a shallow offset of Sun Dance Cañon. When the stage had got well around this curve, two miles from the scene of the hold-up, and almost opposite it, Billings jerked back on the bits, and brought his team to a stop.
“Why,” cried De Bray, starting up from his seat and looking backward, “what’s become of the little Indian, Buffalo Bill’s pard?”
But Chick Billings was not thinking of Little Cayuse just then; nor was Lonesome Pete, nor Hotchkiss.
“You ornery whelp!” breathed Billings, gripping De Bray about the shoulders, “hyer’s whar ye gits yours, an’ git it plenty! Thar’s a rope under the seat, Pete. Lay holt o’ it, an’ reave a noose in the end. We ain’t fur from a tree hyer, an’ I reckons we know what ter do!”