Page:Frank Spearman--Whispering Smith.djvu/287

 will tell you—in hell, because it would be easier to ride out of.

To the railroad men the country offered no unusual difficulties. The Youngs were as much at home on a horse as on a hand car. Kennedy, though a large and powerful man, was inured to hard riding, and Bob Scott and Whispering Smith in the saddle were merely a part—though an important part—of their horses; without killing their mounts, they could get out of them every mile in their legs. The five men covered twenty miles on a trail that read like print. One after another of the railroad party commented on the carelessness with which it had been left. But twenty miles south of the railroad, in an open and comparatively easy country, it was swallowed completely up in the tracks of a hundred horses. The railroad men circled far and wide, only to find the herd tracks everywhere ahead of them.

“This is a beautiful job,” murmured Whispering Smith as the party rode together along the edge of a creek-bottom. “Now who is their friend down in this country? What man would get out a bunch of horses like this and work them this hard so early in the morning? Let’s hunt that man up. I like to meet a man that is a friend in need.”

Bob Scott spoke: “I saw a man with some 263