“Sure, but—there was nothing doing. It was loaded down with rocks.”
Just for one brief instant a bitter imprecation hovered on the officer’s lips. Then, in a wave of inspiration, he shouted his conviction.
“By God, then we’re on the right trail now. It’s the buckboard ahead. We must get it. That’s the cargo, sure as fate. Come on!”
A light buckboard was moving leisurely over the open prairie. It was just an ordinary, spidery buckboard drawn by an unusually fine team of horses, and driven by a slightish man clad in a dark jacket and cord riding-breeches, with a wide prairie hat drawn firmly down upon his dark head, its brim deeply shading his boyish, good-looking face. Running beside his team, tied to the neck yoke of the near-side driver, was a saddle horse. It was a fine beast, with racehorse quarters, and a shoulder laid back for speed.
The buckboard was well loaded. Nor was its load disguised. It consisted of a number of the small wooden kegs adopted for the purpose of transporting contraband liquor.
But though the vehicle moved over the rough grass in such a leisurely fashion, the man’s eyes were alert and watchful. His ears, too, were sharply set, and lost no sound, as his eyes lost no sight, in the distant prospect of the country through which he was traveling.
His gait was by no means the result of any reposeful sense. It was the well-calculated result of caution. There was caution in his whole poise. In the quick turn of the head at any predominating sound. In the sharp glance of his dark eyes at any of the more fantastic shadows cast by the searching moonlight. Then, too, a tight hand was upon the reins, and there was an alert searching for those badger and gopher holes so perilous for horses in the uncertain light of the moon.
He was traveling in a parallel, a mile to the south of the river trail, and, far ahead, to the right, he could see the bush which marked the winding course of the river.
Now he was listening to the faint rumble of a wagon moving along the trail, and, with which, though so far away, he was carefully keeping pace. This was his whole object—to keep pace, almost step for step, with the rumbling movement of the distant wagon.