t, if he has ever slept in a
round-up camp with a dozen restless night-horses saddled and tied to a
wagon twenty feet from his bed. But it made us jump, welling up out of
the dark so unexpectedly and so near.

"Saddle-horse--tied," Mac tersely commented. We squatted in the long
grass and buck-brush, listening, and a few seconds later heard a horse
snort distinctly. This sound was immediately followed by the steady beat
of an impatient forefoot.

"Over yonder," I said. "And there's more than one, I think. Let's
investigate this. And we'd better not separate."

Fifty yards to the left we struck a cottonwood grove, and in the outer
edge of it loomed the vague outline of a horse--when we were almost
within reaching-distance of him. I ran my hand over the saddle and knew
it instantly for Bruce Haggin's rig. A half-minute of quiet prowling
revealed our full quota of livestock, even to the pack-horse that bore
our beds and grub, each one tied hard and fast to a tree. Also our
six-shooters reposed in their scabbards, the four belts hooked over the
horn of MacRae's saddle.

Maybe it didn't feel good to be on the hurricane deck of a good horse
once more! Whenever I have to walk any distance, I can always understand
why a horse-thief yields to temptation and finally becomes confirmed in
his habit. It was rather an odd thing for those outlaws to leave
everything, even to our guns, but I figured--and time proved the
correctness of my arithmetic--that they had bigger fish to fry.

Once in the saddle, with the comfortable weight of a cartridge-belt
around each man's middle, we experienced a revulsion of feeling. Primed
for trouble if we could jump it out of the brush, we rode the bottom
for half an hour. But our men were gone. At least, we could not locate
them. So we took to the upland again and loped toward Pend d' Oreille.

"I've been thinking it isn't so strange--those old fellows being in this
country--after all," Mac suddenly began, as we slowed our horses down to
take a hill. "I didn't remember at first, but two years ago, just after
I joined the Force, I ran across a bull-whacker on the Whoop Up trail,
and he told me that the Double R had closed out. He said Hank had got
into a ruction with Dick Feltz--you recollect there was considerable
feeling between them in our time down there--and killed him one day at
Fort Worth. Feltz had some folks that took it up, and Hank had to spend
a barrel of money to come clear. That, and