"Thank you, Colonel," returned Silk, "but I've changed my plans. I've got to go back to Macleod with a man who is rather ill. Good-night!"
He said nothing of who the man was, and no one on the train knew then or even afterwards anything of the danger that they had escaped. But that was Sergeant Silk's way.
CHAPTER IX
RED DERRICK
If there was one thing more than another that Percy Rapson and Dan Medlicott coveted, it was an opportunity to accompany Sergeant Silk on one of his police expeditions on the Rattlesnake patrol. But such an opportunity came very seldom, and it was quite an exceptional circumstance that Dan happened to be able to make himself of use on the occasion when Red Derrick was captured in White Wolf Gulch.
The way it all happened was this—
Two men were riding along the trail, one on a piebald broncho, the other on a black mustang. They were on their way to the meeting place appointed by their leader, Red Derrick. Everything had been well planned, but they were not fully certain that they were safe, and they were both nervously anxious. As they came out from the gloom of a pine forest into the open, the man on the piebald broncho looked searchingly into the night darkness over his left shoulder. Then he shifted his grip on the reins and glanced uneasily at his companion.
"Say, Bill," he inquired, "you plumb sure as we ain't bein' follered?"