oked down on Pend
d' Oreille, and, a few minutes later, came riding nonchalantly up to the
mess-house.

"Well, you beat us in," Goodell greeted airily. "Did you find a short
cut?"

"Sure thing," I responded, with what irony I could command.

"Where the deuce _did_ you go, anyway, after you stopped in that
creek-bottom?" he asked, eying me with much curiosity. "We nearly played
our horses out galloping around looking for you--after we'd gone a mile
or so, and you didn't catch up."

"Then you must have kept damned close to the coulee-bottoms," I retorted
ungraciously, "for I burnt the earth getting up on a pinnacle where you
could see me, before you had time to go very far."

"Oh, well, it's easy to lose track of a lone man in a country as big as
this," he returned suavely. "We all got here, so what's the odds? I
guess we'll stick here till morning. We can't make the round trip this
afternoon, and I'm not camping on the hills when it's avoidable."

It struck me that he was uncommonly philosophical about it, so I merely
grunted and went on with my dinner.

That evening, when we went to the stable to fix up our horses for the
night, I got a clearer insight into his reason for laying over that
afternoon. They had been doing some tall riding, and their livestock was
simply unfit to go farther. The four saddle-horses looked as if they had
been dragged through a small-sized knothole; their gauntness, and the
dispirited droop of their heads, spelled complete fatigue to any man who
knew the symptoms of hard riding. By comparison, my sweat-grimed dun was
fresh as a morning breeze.

CHAPTER XI.

THE GENTLEMAN WHO RODE IN THE LEAD.

It took us all of the next day to make the trip to Stony Crossing and
back by way of the place where Rutter was buried. Goodell had no fancy,
he said, for a night camp on the prairie when it could be avoided. He
planned to make an early start from Pend d' Oreille, and thus reach Walsh
by riding late the next night. So, well toward evening, we swung back to
the river post. Goodell and his fellows were nowise troubled by the
presence of dead men; they might have been packing so much merchandise,
from their demeanor. But I was a long way from feeling cheerful. The
ghastly burdens, borne none too willingly by the extra horses, put a
damper on me, and I'm a pretty sanguine individual as a rule.

When we had unloaded the bodies from the uneasy horses, and laid them
carefully in a lean-to