ight covers up their
track. Don't yuh worry none, old boy," he bellowed at MacRae. "Old Injun
Smith'll see yuh through. God! I could 'a' cried m'self when I hit that
camp an' the old nigger woman went t' bawlin' when I told her yuh was
both out on the bench, sound as a new dollar. That was the first they
suspicioned anythin' was wrong. Them dirty, low-lived ---- ---- ----!"

Piegan lapsed into a string of curses. MacRae, apparently unmoved,
nodded comprehension. But I knew what he was thinking, and I knew that
when once we got within striking distance of Hicks, Gregory & Co., there
would be new faces in hell without delay.

We slowed our horses to a walk to ascend an abrupt ridge. When we gained
the top a vast stretch of the Northwest spread away to the east and
north. Piegan lifted his eyes from the trail for an instant.

"Great Lord!" he said. "Look at the buffalo. It'll be good-by t' these
tracks before long."

As far as the eye could reach the prairie was speckled with the herds,
speckled with groups of buffalo as the sky is dotted with clusters of
bright stars on a clear night. They moved, drifting slowly, in a
southerly direction, here in sharply defined groups, there in long
lines, farther in indistinct masses. But they moved; and the air that
filled our nostrils was freighted with the tang of smoke.

We did not halt on the ridge. There was no need. We knew without
speculating what the buffalo-drift and the smoke-tinged air presaged;
and it bade us make haste before the tracks were quite obliterated.

So with the hill behind us, and each of us keeping his thoughts to
himself--none of them wholly pleasant, judging by my own--we galloped
down the long slope, a red sunset at our backs and in our faces a gale
of dry, warm wind, tainted with the smell of burning grass. And at the
bottom of the slope, in the depths of a high-walled coulee where the
evening shadows were mustering for their stealthy raid on the gilded
uplands, we circled a grove of rustling poplars and jerked our horses up
short at sight of a scarlet blotch among the gloom of the trees.

CHAPTER XVIII.

HONOR AMONG THIEVES.

We knew, even as our fingers instinctively closed on the handles of our
six-shooters, that we had not come upon the men we wanted; in such a
case there would have been an exchange of leaden courtesies long before
we managed to get in their immediate vicinity. It was unlikely that they
would cease to exercise the cun