"But the chance?" persisted the big man, looking him over appraisively.

"You don't look like a man who has had to hang round on the aidges hankerin' after things he couldn't get."

"I guess I haven't had to do that very often," was the reflective rejoinder. "But a mile or so back we pa.s.sed a bunch of cattle, with the night man riding watch; I was just saying to myself that I'd like to change places with that night-herd--only there wasn't going to be any chance."

The bearded man's laugh was a deep-chested rumbling suggestive of rocks rolling down a declivity.

"Lordy gracious!" he chuckled. "If you was to get a leg over a bronc', and the bronc' should find it out--Say, I've got a li'l' blue horse out on my place in the Antelopes that'd plumb give his ears to have you try it; he sh.o.r.e would. You take my advice, and don't you go huntin' a job night-ridin' in the greasewood hills. Don't you do it!"

"I a.s.sure you I hadn't thought of doing it for a permanency. But just for a bit of adventure, if the chance should offer while I'm in the notion. I believe I'd take it. I haven't ridden a cow-pony for fourteen years, but I don't believe I've lost the knack of it."

"Ho!" said the big man. "Then you ain't as much of a tenderfoot as you look to be. Shake!" and he held out a hand as huge as a bear's paw.

Following the hand-grip he grew confidential. "'Long in the afternoon I stuck my head in at the door and saw you chewin' the rag with a thin-faced old nester that couldn't set still in his chair while he talked. Know him?"

"Not at all," said Blount promptly. "He has the section opposite mine, and he got on at Omaha."

"Well, I wouldn't want to know him if I was you," was the bearded man's comment. Then: "Tryin' to get you to invest in some o' his properties?"

"Oh, no."

"Well, he will, if he gets a chance. He'd go furder'n that; he'd nail you up to the cross and skin you alive if there was any money in it for him. His name's Simon Peter, and it ort to be Judas. I know him down to the ground!"

"Simon Peter?" said Blount inquiringly.

"Ya-as; Simon Peter Hathaway. And my name's Griggs; Griggs, of the Antelopes, back o' Carnadine--if anybody should ask you who give you your pointer on Simon Peter Judas. I don't blacklist no man in the dark, and I've said a heap more to that old ratter's face than I've ever said behind his back. Ump! him a-wrigglin' in that chair you're settin' in and tryin' to fix up some way to skin you! Don't tell me! I know blame'

well what he was tryin' to do."

Blount listened and was interested, not so much in the bit of gossip as in the big, red-faced ranchman, who so evidently had a grudge to pay off.

"I am not likely to have any dealings with Mr. Hathaway," he rejoined.

"And I must do him the bare justice of saying that he wasn't trying to sell me anything. The shoe was on the other foot. He seemed to be afraid he was in danger of losing out, and he was asking my advice."

"S.P. Hathaway lose out? Not on your life, my young friend! You say he was askin' for advice? You've done stirred up my curiosity a whole heap, and I reckon you'll have to tell me who you are before it'll ca'm down again."

Blount laughed. "Mr. Hathaway thinks I am a special agent for the Government, travelling on business for the Forest Service."

"The h.e.l.l he does!" exploded the big man. Then he reached over and laid a swollen finger on Blount's knee. "Say, boy, before you or him ever gets off this train--Sufferin' Moses! what was that?"

The break came upon a thunderous crash transmitting itself from car to car, and the long, heavy train came to a juggling stop. The ranchman sprang to his feet with an alacrity surprising in so huge a body and ducked to look out of the open window.

"Twin b.u.t.tes!" he gurgled. "And, say, it's a wreck! We've hit something right slap in the middle of the yard! Let's make a break for the scene of the confliggration till we see who's killed!"

Blount followed the ranchman's lead, but shortly lost sight of the burly figure in the crowd of curious pa.s.sengers pouring from the hastily opened vestibules. Seen at closer range, the accident appeared to be disastrous only in a material sense. The heavy "Pacific-type" locomotive had stumbled over the tongue of a split switch, leaving the rails and making a blockading barrier of itself across the tracks. n.o.body was hurt; but there would be a delay of some hours before the track could be cleared.

Finding little to hold him in the spectacle of the derailed locomotive, Blount strolled on through the railroad yard to the station and the town. He remembered the place chiefly by its name. In his boyhood it had been the nearest railroad forwarding-point for the mines at Lewiston, thirty miles beyond the Lost Hills. Now, as it appeared, it had become a lumber-shipping station. To the left of the railroad there were numerous sawmills, each with its mountain of waste dominated by a black chimney, screen-capped. For the supply of logs an enormous flume led down from the slopes of the forested range on the south, a trough-like water-chute out of which, though the working-day was ended, the great logs were still tumbling in an intermittent stream.

North of the town the valley broke away into a region of bare mesas dotted with rounded, b.u.t.te-like hills, with the b.u.t.tressing ranges on either side to lift the eastern and western horizons. The northern prospect enabled Blount to place himself accurately, and the tide of remembrance swept strongly in upon him. Some forty-odd miles away to the northeast, just beyond the horizon-lifting lesser range, lay the "short-gra.s.s" region in which he had spent the happy boyhood. An hour's gallop through the hills to the westward the level rays of the setting sun would be playing upon the little station of Painted Hat, the one-time shipping-point for the home ranch. And half-way between Painted Hat and the "Circle-Bar," nestling in the hollowed hands of the mountains, were the horse-corrals of one Debbleby, a true hermit of the hills, and the boy Evan's earliest school-master in the great book of Nature.

Blount's one meliorating softness during the years of exile had manifested itself in an effort to keep track of Debbleby. He knew that the old horse-breeder was still alive, and that he was still herding his brood mares at the ranch on the Pigskin. The young man, fresh from the well-calculated East, threw up his head and sniffed the keen, cool breeze sweeping down from the northern hills. He was not given to impulsive plan-changing. On the contrary, he was slow to resolve and proportionately tenacious of the determination once made. But the stirring of boyish memories accounted for something; and in the sanest brain there are sleeping cells of irresponsibility ready to spring alive at the touch of suggestion. What if he should--

He sat down upon the edge of the station platform and thought it out deliberately. Since it would be hours before the tracks could be cleared and the rail journey resumed, what was to prevent him from taking an immediate and delightful plunge into the region of the heart-stirring recollections? Doubtless old Jason Debbleby was at this moment sitting on the door-step of his lonely ranch-house in the Pigskin foot-hills, smoking his corn-cob pipe and, quite possibly, wondering what had become of the boy whom he had taught to "rope down" and saddle and ride. Blount estimated the distance as he remembered it. With a hired horse he might reach Debbleby's by late bedtime; and after a night spent with the old ranchman he could ride on across the big mesa to the capital.

Another ineffectual attempt to find out how soon the relief train from the capital might be expected decided Blount. Arranging with the Pullman conductor to have his hand-luggage left in Gantry's office at the capital, the man in search of his boyhood crossed quickly to a livery-stable opposite the station, bargained for a saddle-horse, borrowed a poncho and a pair of leggings, and prepared to break violently, for the moment at least, with all the civilized traditions.

He would go and see Debbleby--drop in upon the old horse-breeder without warning, and thus get his first revivified impression of the homeland unmixed with any of the disappointing changes which were doubtless awaiting him at the real journey's end.

Now it chanced that the livery-stable was an adjunct to the single hotel in the small sawmill town, and as Blount was mounting to ride he saw the thin-faced man, whom the ranchman, Griggs, had named for him, standing on the porch of the hotel in earnest talk with three others who, from their appearance, might have figured either as "timber jacks" or cowboys. Blount was on the point of recognizing his companion of the Pullman smoking-compartment as he rode past the hotel to take the trail to the northward, but a curious conviction that the gentleman with the bird-of-prey eyes was making him the subject of the earnest talk with the three men of doubtful occupation restrained him. A moment later, when he looked back from the crossing of the railroad track, he saw that all four of the men on the porch were watching him. This he saw; and if the backward glance had been prolonged for a single instant he might also have seen a big, barrel-bodied man with a red face stumbling out of the side door of the shack hotel to make vigorous and commanding signals to stop him. But this he missed.

There was an excuse for the oversight as well as for the speedy blotting out of the picture of the four men watching him from the porch of the hotel. With a fairly good horse under him, with the squeak of the saddle-leather in his ears and the smell of it in his nostrils, and with the wide world of the immensities into which to ride unhampered and free, the lost boyhood was found. Not for the most soul-satisfying professional triumph the fettered East could offer him would he have curtailed the free-reined flight into the silent wilderness by a single mile.

For the first half-hour of the invigorating gallop the fugitive from civilization had the sunset glow to help him find the trail. After that the moon rose, and the landmarks, which had seemed more or less familiar in daylight, lost their remembered featurings. During the first few miles the trail had led broadly across the table-land, with the eastern mountains withdrawing and the Lost River Range looming larger as its lofty sky-line was struck out sharply against the sunset horizon.

Farther on, in the transition darkness between sunset and moon-rise, the trail disappeared entirely; but so long as he was sure of the general direction, Blount held on and gave the tireless little bronco a loose rein. The Debbleby ranch lay among the farther foot-hills of the western range, with the broad gulch of the Pigskin cutting a plain highway through the mountains. If he could find one of the head-water streams of the Pigskin, all of which took their rise in the gulches of the mesa, there could be no danger of losing the way.

It was some little time after he had left the shoulderings of the eastern range behind that a singular thing happened. Far away on his right he heard the sound of galloping hoofs. Though the moon was nearly full and the treeless landscape was bare of any kind of cover, he could not make out the horseman who was evidently pa.s.sing him and going in the same direction. At first he thought it was some one who was making a _detour_ to avoid him. Then he smiled at the absurdity of the guess and concluded that he himself was off the trail. This conclusion was confirmed a little later when two other travellers, announcing themselves to the ear as the first one had, and also, like the first, invisible to the sharpest eye-sweep of the moonlit plain, pa.s.sed him at speed.

After that Blount had the solitudes and vastnesses to himself, and it was not until after the mesa-land had been crossed without a sign of a water-leading gulch to guide him to the Pigskin, and the bronco was patiently picking its way through the hogback of the western range, that the boyish thing he had been led to do took shape as an adventure which might have discomforting consequences.

For, after the hired bronco had wandered aimlessly through many gulches and had climbed a good half-score of the hogback hills, the young man from the East admitted that the boyhood memories were hopelessly and altogether at fault in the deceptive moonlight. Blount gave the horse a breathing halt on one of the hogbacks and tried to reconstruct the puzzling hills into some featuring that he could remember. The effort was fruitless. He was very thoroughly and painstakingly lost.

IV

THE HIGHBINDERS

When the three men who had pulled him from his horse and tied him hand and foot had withdrawn to the farther side of the tiny camp-fire to wrangle morosely over what should be done with him, Evan Blount found it simply impossible to realize that they were actually discussing, as one of the expedients, the propriety of knocking him on the head and flinging his body into the near-by canyon.

The difficulty of comprehension lay in the crude grotesqueness of the thing that had happened. Five minutes earlier he had been riding peacefully up the trail in the moonlight, wondering how thoroughly he was lost and how much farther it was to Debbleby's. Then, at a sudden sharp turn in the canyon bridle-path, he had stumbled upon the camp-fire, had heard an explosive "Hands up!" and had found himself confronted by three men, with one of the three covering him with a sawed-off Winchester. From that to the unhorsing and the binding had been merely a rough-and-tumble half-minute, inasmuch as he was unarmed and the surprise had been complete; but the grotesquery remained.

Since his captors had as yet made no attempt to rob him, he could only surmise that some incredibly foolish mistake had been made. But when he remembered the three invisible hors.e.m.e.n who had pa.s.sed him on the broad mesa he was not so certain about the mistake. Most naturally, his thoughts went back to the little episode on the hotel porch. The pa.s.sing glance he had given to the three men with whom the fourth man, Hathaway, had been talking did not enable him to identify them with the three who were sourly discussing his fate at the near-by fire; none the less, the conclusion was fairly obvious. Thus far he had been either too busy or too bewildered to break in; but when the more murderous of the expedients was apparently about to be adopted, he decided that it was high time to try to find out why he was to be effaced. Whereupon he called across to the group at the fire.

"Without wishing to interfere with any arrangements you gentlemen are making, I shall be obliged if you will tell me why you think you have found it necessary to murder me."

"You know mighty good and well why there's one too many of you on Lost River, jest at this stage o' the game," growled the hard-faced spokesman who had held the Winchester while his two accomplices were doing the unhorsing and the binding.

"But I don't," insisted Blount good-naturedly. "So far as I know, there is only one of me--on Lost River or anywhere else."

"That'll do for you; it ain't your put-in, nohow," was the gruff decision of the court; but Blount was too good a lawyer to be silenced thus easily.

"Perhaps you might not especially regret killing the wrong man, but in the present case I am very sure I should," he went on. And then: "Are you quite sure you've got the right man?"

"The boss knows who you are--that's enough for us."

"The boss?" questioned Blount.

"Yas, I said the boss; now hold your jaw!"

Blount caught at the word. In a flash the talk with Gantry on the veranda of the Winneba.s.set Club flicked into his mind.