danna. So does
Keller. He'll have to go some to explain away that. I reckon the others
must be nesters from Bear Creek, too."

"We've got 'em where the wool's short this time," Budd agreed. "They
been shootin' around right promiscuous. If anybody's dead, then Keller
has put a rope round his own neck."

Men were already saddling and mounting for the first unorganized
pursuit. Slim and his friend joined these, and cantered down the dusty
street scarce ten minutes after the robbers.

The suburbs of the town fell to the rear, and left them in the fall and
rise of the foothills that merged to the left in the wide, flat,
shimmering plain of the Malpais, and on the other side in the
saw-toothed range that notched the horizon from north to south.
Somewhere in that waste of cow-backed hills, in that swell of endless
land waves, the trail of the robbers vanished.

Men rode far and wide, carrying the pursuit late into the night, but the
lost trail was not to be picked up again. So one by one, or in pairs,
under the yellow stars, they drifted back to Noches, leaving behind the
black depths of blue-canopied hills that had swallowed the fleeing
quartette.

CHAPTER XVIII

BRILL HEALY AIRS HIS SENTIMENTS

To Phyllis, riding from school near the close of a hot Friday afternoon
along the old Fort Lincoln Trail, came the voice of Brill Healy from the
ridge above. She waved to him the broad-brimmed hat she was carrying in
her hand, and he guided his pony deftly down the edge of the steep
slope.

"Been looking for some strays down at Three Pines," he explained. "Awful
glad I met you."

"Where were you going now?" she asked.

"Home, I reckon; but I'll ride with you to Seven Mile if you don't
mind."

She looked at her watch. "It's just five-thirty. We'll be in time for
supper, and you can ride home afterward."

"I guess you know that will suit me, Phyllis," he answered, with a
meaning look from his dark eyes.

"Supper suits most healthy men so far as I've noticed," she said
carelessly, her glance sweeping keenly over him before it passed to the
purple shadowings that already edged the mouth of a distant canon.

"I'll bet it does when they can sit opposite Phyl Sanderson to eat it."

She frowned a little, the while he took her in out of half-shut,
smoldering eyes, as one does a picture in a gallery. In truth, one might
have ridden far to find a living picture more vital and more suggestive
of the land that had crad