They were too far away to, see the
shifting of rifles to the laps of the riders, or perhaps they would not have
felt quite so satisfied with the steady advance of the four who had taken the
right-hand fork of the trail. They could not even tell just which four men
made up the party. They did not greatly care, so long as the, force of the
white men was divided. They galloped away upon urgent business of their own,
elated because their ruse had worked out as they had planned and hoped.
Applehead took a restrained pull at the canteen, cocked his eyes back at the
butte they had just passed, squinted ahead over the flat waste that shimmered
with heat to the very skyline that was notched and gashed crudely with more
barren hills, and then, screwing the top absent-mindedly on the canteen-mouth,
leaned and peered long at the hoofprints they were following. Beside him Lite
Avery, tall and lean to the point of being skinny, followed his movements with
quiet attention and himself took to studying more closely the hoofprints in
the sandy soil.
Applehead looked up, gauged the probable direction the trail was taking, and
gave a grunt.
"You kin call me a fool," he said with a certain challenge in his tone, "but
this yere trail don't look good to me, somehow.
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