Page:Cherokee Trails (1928).pdf/200

 would have to come off in that event the horses might be stampeded, scattered and lost. In the open a man would have a chance. There he could run and see his way.

Simpson was strained as tight as a wet rope as he rode. It was raining hard, and promised to come harder; the slicker around his sack of grub would be of more use on his back, but he could not stop to get it now. It was going to be a long night if he ever lived to the end of it, and a cold one, but the sun might be shining in Kansas tomorrow.

The thought picked him up with a new hope. Then as the slow accumulation of gloom settled over the dripping land, fold on fold, blending the tree trunks in the dark, leaving only their tops outlined here and there dimly against the gray clouds, Simpson glimpsed an opening in the woods leading off in the direction he wanted to go. A trail, he took it to be, probably used by wood-haulers, perhaps leading off to some sequestered ranch.

He rode around the plodding band of steaming horses and turned the lead mare back. He had some difficulty in doing so, as she was stubbornly set on following that road. She had come that way; she knew it was the trail back home. The suspicious creature did not like the deflection from the beaten trail. She shied and bolted, starting back to the old road. Simpson was almost on the point of yielding to her instinct when she suddenly took a notion to do as he wanted her to, and trotted off up the unknown trail, the rest of the band trailing confidently after her, Simpson bringing up the rear.

It was only then, jogging along after the horses seen dimly through the thickening darkness, that Simpson be-