“And you have no idea,” continued the captain, “who the man is that carried your friend Leather so hurriedly away?”
“Not the slightest,” returned Buck. “Had my revolver been handy and an ounce of strength left in me, you wouldn’t have had to ask the question.”
“Passing strange!” murmured Captain Wilmot, glancing at the scout, who was at the moment seated on a keg before the fire lighting his pipe, and with a look of simple benignant stolidity on his grave countenance. “Have you no idea, Ben, where these outlaws have taken themselves off to?”
“No more’n a lop-eared rabbit, Captain Wilmot,” answered the scout. “You see there’s a good many paths by which men who knows the place could git out o’ the Trap, an’ once out o’ it there’s the whole o’ the Rockie range where to pick an’ choose.”
“But how comes it, Ben, that you missed Jake? Surely the road is not so broad that you could pass him unseen! Yet you arrived here before him?”
“That’s true, sir, but sly coons like the Flint can retire into the brush when they don’t want to be overhauled. That wasn’t the way of it, however. With such a splendid animal as your poor horse, Captain, an’ ridden to death as it was—an’ as I ’spected it would be—I knowed I had no chance o’ comin’ up wi’ the Flint, so I took advantage o’ my knowledge o’ the lay o’ the land, an’ pushed ahead by a straighter line—finishin’ the last bit on futt over the ridge of a hill. That sent me well ahead o’ the Flint, an’ so I got here before him. Havin’ ways of eavesdroppin’ that other people don’t know on, I peeped into the cave here, and saw and heard how matters stood. Then I thought o’ harkin’ back on my tracks an’ stoppin’ the Flint wi’ a bullet but I reflected ‘what good’ll that do? The shot would wake up the outlaws an’ putt them on the scent all the same.’ Then I tried to listen what their talk was about, so as I might be up to their dodges; but I hadn’t bin listenin’ long when in tramps the Flint an’ sounds the alarm. Of course I might have sent him an p’r’aps one o’ the others to their long home from where I stood; but I’ve always had an objection to shoot a man behind his back. It has such a sneakin’ sort o’ feel about it! An’ then, the others—I couldn’t see how many there was—would have swarmed out on me, an’ I’d have had to make tracks for the scrub, an’ larn nothin’ more. So I fixed to keep quiet an’ hear and see all that I could—p’r’aps find out where they fixed to pull out to. But I heard nothin’ more worth tellin’. They only made some hurried, an’ by no means kindly, observations about poor Buck an’ Leather an’ went off over the hills. I went into the woods a bit myself after that, just to be well out o’ the way, so to speak, an’ when I got back here Leather was gone!”
“And you didn’t see the man that carried him off?”
“No, I didn’t see him.”
“You’d have shot him, of course, if you had seen him?”
“No, indeed, captain, I wouldn’t.”