our beds and grub, each one tied hard and fast to a tree. Also our
six-shooters reposed in their scabbards, the four belts hooked over the
horn of MacRae's saddle.

Maybe it didn't feel good to be on the hurricane deck of a good horse
once more! Whenever I have to walk any distance, I can always understand
why a horse-thief yields to temptation and finally becomes confirmed in
his habit. It was rather an odd thing for those outlaws to leave
everything, even to our guns, but I figured--and time proved the
correctness of my arithmetic--that they had bigger fish to fry.

Once in the saddle, with the comfortable weight of a cartridge-belt
around each man's middle, we experienced a revulsion of feeling. Primed
for trouble if we could jump it out of the brush, we rode the bottom
for half an hour. But our men were gone. At least, we could not locate
them. So we took to the upland again and loped toward Pend d' Oreille.

"I've been thinking it isn't so strange--those old fellows being in this
country--after all," Mac suddenly began, as we slowed our horses down to
take a hill. "I didn't remember at first, but two years ago, just after
I joined the Force, I ran across a bull-whacker on the Whoop Up trail,
and he told me that the Double R had closed out. He said Hank had got
into a ruction with Dick Feltz--you recollect there was considerable
feeling between them in our time down there--and killed him one day at
Fort Worth. Feltz had some folks that took it up, and Hank had to spend
a barrel of money to come clear. That, and a range war that grew out of
the killing, and some kind of a business deal just about broke them.
That's the way this fellow had it; said a trail-boss told him at
Ogalalla that spring. I didn't take much stock in the yarn at the time,
but I'm beginning to think he had it straight. You didn't hear anything