Tom’s chagrin had given place to a feeling of elation. Now there was no one to hold him in check. He was his own master, to ride the great reaches before him as fast or as slowly as he pleased. Cattle rustlers! Smugglers!—Bah! He’d like to see any who could frighten him!
“I know the settlement Larry is bound for,” he reflected—“found it on Bob Somers’ map. Ha, ha—won’t little ‘Fear-not’ be surprised to see me flying up behind him?”
Fool’s Castle soon became but a spot of light in the far-away distance. Before him was the undulating prairie, the grass and earth sometimes glowing with color, then shadowed by passing clouds. Although Tom rode fast, he eagerly kept his eyes open for evidences of the “fugitive.”
“This isn’t like a paper chase,” he muttered. “Guess even Thunderbolt wouldn’t find it so easy.”
Then, for the first time, the lad noted a sense of loneliness beginning to steal over him. Before, his thoughts had been so busily occupied that he had scarcely considered anything but duty. Now, however, without the cheery voices of his companions, or the sight of them galloping close by, the prairie, vast and almost unbroken, took on a strangely desolate appearance.
Not a living thing was in sight; not even a bird. He reflected how easy it might be for an inexperienced traveler like Larry to lose his bearings.
After several hours’ traveling Tom reached a range of hills over which it was extremely difficult to find a route. Steep and rocky slopes turned him aside, or thickly-timbered stretches filled with underbrush made progress very slow.
“Gee whiz! There wasn’t anything on Bob Somers’ map that looked like this,” soliloquized the lad. “I wonder how in the world little ‘Fear-not’ managed?”
As the horse struggled up a steep incline, every impact of its hoofs sending down showers of turf and stones, Tom’s face reflected his worried feelings. Long before this he had expected to overtake the “deserter.” His pride rebelled at the thought of returning to the camp without him, or not being able to greet his friends with the triumphant shout:
“Hello, boys; I saw Larry off on the train, all right!”