powerful engine tore like a
black meteor up the glistening track. In eagerness and excitement
almost uncontrollable George Graham clung to his perch and gazed with
all his eyes. Barely a mile ahead now spurred the fugitives, his old
friend Nolan in their midst--Nolan whom he had come all those miles to
see!

And then a strange thing happened. So far from finding reassurance,
friendship, sympathy in the whistle blast, the riders had read the very
opposite. So far from slackening speed and letting the signalling train
come up on them, they had suddenly veered to the left, the south, and,
bending low like jockies over their coursers' manes, they shot across
the track, dived down into the pebbly bottom, and the next thing
Geordie saw they were plunging breast-deep through the brown and
heaving torrent, the waters foaming at their knees.

"Might 'a' known it!" bellowed Toomey, disgusted. "'Course they reason
we've got the sheriff and posse aboard, and they're taking the
short-cut to the--you know," he said, with a sudden significant gulp,
to Geordie, and a warning glance at Ben. Even now that he had left the
trooper habits months behind, Toomey could not forget or disregard
trooper ethics. Ben might be friendly to Nolan, just as he claimed,
but--would Ben keep other's secrets?

And even under his coat of coal and tan Geordie's face blazed suddenly.
As a lad whom the troopers knew and loved and trusted, he could not
help knowing in by-gone days of the ranch just south of the
post--"Saints' Rest," they called it, laughingly--the shack owned and
occupied by an old soldier with a numerous family: the rendezvous for
many a revel, the resting-place of many a hunting-party, the refuge of
many a home-bound squad of "the boys," before the days of the canteen
that brought comfort and temperance into the army for the short but
blessed spell of its existence--boys just back from an unhallowed
frolic in town, and not yet sober enough to face their first sergeant
and "the Old Man" at the orderly room. Oh, wonderful things were told
of old Shiner and his ranch! In the eyes of some straitlaced commanders
he had been little better than a receiver of stolen goods, a soldier
Shylock who loaned moneys at usurious interest, a gambler who fleeced
the trooper folk of their scanty pay, a dispenser of bad liquors and
worse morals. Some truth there may have been in some of these tales,
yet Shiner had been a strangely useful man. He supplied the p