Page:The Cross Pull.pdf/60

 Late in the afternoon they stopped on the crest of a mighty divide, and Moran turned for one last look at the country over which they had wandered alone for the last three months.

In a narrow valley below, a file of moving specks caught his eye and he focused his glasses on the spot. Two men were wrangling a string of a dozen packhorses along a game trail.

Two cream colored buckskins and a calico pinto in the outfit identified the string as Brent’s.

Moran knew that the other man would be the same one Brent guided to this seed for a hunting trip each fall.

There’s Brent, Flash,” he said. “They’re just coming in so it’s just as well we’re going out. You’d stumble across their camp some night and hell would be to pay. I wouldn’t give two cents for Brent’s chance to go on living if you found him curled up some place asleep.”

“That man with him is a New York lawyer—Luther Nash. I’d like to have you sniff him over and hear his voice. I’m curious to know what your verdict would be on Nash.”

Every fall Nash came for a two weeks’ trip into the hills with Brent, and Moran had met him several years before. On one of Moran’s trips