The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush. Lynde Francis

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 moonrise, 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 passing him and going in the same direction. At first he thought it was some one who was making a détour 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, passed 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

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THE HIGHBINDERS

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      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 horsemen who had passed 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 passing 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 Winnebasset Club flicked into his mind.

      "There is only one boss in this State," he countered coolly. "And I am very sure he СКАЧАТЬ