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The audacious rogues were in no hurry to get off, doubtless because they did not care to urge their winded horses away from no apparent danger when they might need all that was in them in case they should meet up with a true posse later on. Taking things as they appeared around the Ellison place there was little chance of anybody pursuing them in time to make trouble. There wasn't a horse around the place except the one they had taken, and nobody there that seemed very formidable.

The man who had used his dukes so effectively in the encounter with Eddie Kane seemed to go into a daze with the prod of gun in the tank. A fist man was not a gun man, as a usual thing. They rode off laughing loudly, well satisfied that they had nothing to fear from him. The little wildcat in boots and overalls had supplied them a pleasant diversion.

Their horses sank to the fetlocks in the road outside the Ellison gate, for it was bottom land, the rain had soaked it deep. The lucky retrievers of Sid Coburn's fortune, of which he stood slim chance of ever smelling a dollar again, rode boisterously toward the south, happy in their good luck, allowing their horses to take their own gait as the orchard trees cut them from view of the house and the discomfited three left penned in the corral. That was the easiest turn of fortune ever made in their adventurous