“Well, I don’t see how you could do very much, either to stop the raid or to help, if trouble broke out,” replied Sandy, a smile lighting his face. “If there’s one thing more than another that will stir up a restless crittur, it’s a woman. And you sure wouldn’t be able to stand off a gang of raiders.”
“No-o, I suppose not,” returned the woman, hesitatingly. “Still, if anything should go wrong, and I wasn’t here, Hen would never forgive me.”
Only too well did the foreman realize the truth of this statement, thoroughly familiar as he was with the nature and disposition of the owner of the Star and Moon ranch. But he was determined to rejoin his fellow avengers, and, as an idea came into his mind, he exclaimed:
“Hen didn’t think anything about you when he started after that raider. I don’t see why you should put yourself in danger. If it hadn’t been for my row with Sam, I wouldn’t be here now—and then you would have been in a bad fix, without food, shelter or ponies. It strikes me that, under the circumstance, the thing for you to do is to think only of yourself and come with me to the Double Cross.”
“But how would we get there? We haven’t any ponies and I surely can’t walk thirty miles through the grass.”
“I’ll fix that all right, if that’s all is keeping you. It won’t take me more than an hour or so, perhaps not that long, to round up a couple of the bronchos and then we can start.”
“Then get busy and catch ’em,” exclaimed the woman. “I kind of hate to leave the ranch this way—but Hen Hawks had no business to leave me all alone by myself!”
Waiting never a minute, least the woman repent of her decision, Sandy set out to round up two of the ponies, smiling to himself as he went out onto the plains at Mrs. Hawks’ passionate outburst.
“I wouldn’t be in Hen Hawks’ place when he does get back for all the cattle in that corral,” he grinned.
Thanks to his skill, it did not take the foreman long to catch a couple of the bronchos, and, though they were obliged to ride without saddles or even blankets and with bridles improvised from bits of rawhide lariats which Sandy found, in due course they were on their way to the home ranch of the Double Cross, which they reached soon after daybreak.