The outlaws took counsel of their terror. They were hardy, desperate men, afraid of nothing mortal under the sun. But the dormant superstition in them rose to their throats. Fearfully they wheeled and gave their horses the spur. Flatray could hear them crashing through the brush.
He listened while the rapid hoofbeats died away, until even the echoes fell silent. “We’ll be moving,” he announced to his prisoner.
For a couple of hours they followed substantially the same way that Jack had taken, descending gradually toward the foothills and the plains. The stars went out, and the moon slid behind banked clouds, so that the darkness grew with the passing hours. At length Flatray had to call a halt.
“We’ll camp here till morning,” he announced when they reached a grassy park.
The horses were hobbled, and the men sat down opposite each other in the darkness. Presently the prisoner relaxed and fell asleep. But there was no 216 sleep for his captor. The cattleman leaned against the trunk of a cottonwood and smoked his pipe. The night grew chill, but he dared not light a fire. At last the first streaks of gray dawn lightened the sky. A quarter of an hour later he shook his captive from slumber.
“Time to hit the trail.”
The outlaw murmured sleepily, “How’s that, Dunc? Twenty-five thousand apiece!”
“Wake up! We’ve got to vamose out of here.”
Slowly the fellow shook the sleep from his brain. He looked at Flatray sullenly, without answering. But he climbed into the saddle which Jack had cinched for him. Dogged and wolfish as he was, the man knew his master, and was cowed.