“Larry, we’re in the saddle and on the plains at last.”

“Like it, what?” queried Horace.

“It’s what we’ve been dreaming of for months,” declared Larry.  “Only, I say, Mr. Wilder, let’s drop Megget.  All we did was to get away from him.”

“As you like,” smiled the ranchman, “but that’s something.”

CHAPTER VII

A RACE IN THE MOONLIGHT

Now through waving grass up to their knees, now through stretches of sage brush the hunters rode.  Three or four times they caught sight of cattle in the distance, which Horace eagerly declared belonged to the Half-Moon, explaining that the biggest herds were in Long Creek bottoms, about fifty miles southwest, where the cattle could find water as well as good grazing ground.

“Fifty miles, gracious!  Do you own so much land?” asked Larry of Mr. Wilder.

“No.  We have a thousand acres, more or less.  But my neighbors and I have leased the rights to graze in Lone Creek.”

“Neighbors?” repeated the elder of the brothers in surprise.  “Why I can’t see any house but yours.  In fact, I haven’t seen any since we left Tolopah.”

“And there isn’t any within thirty miles.  There are two on the south and more north, even farther away.  But we call them neighbors just the same.  Anybody within a day’s ride is a neighbor,” explained the ranchman.  And as he noted the look of amusement that appeared on the faces of the brothers, he added:  “You won’t think so much of distances after you’ve been out here a while.”

At the end of two hours, as they mounted the crest of a great roll in the prairies, the dried-up course of a stream was disclosed.

“If you follow that, it will lead you to Lone Creek,” explained Horace.  “Down about ten miles there’s a place called the Witches’ Pool, where we go fishing.  It’s so deep it never dries.  We’ll go there some day.”

“More ghosts?” inquired Larry as he repeated the name of the pool.

“No, no ghosts,” laughed Mr. Wilder, “just the ignis fatuus, or will-o’-the-wisps.  All cowboys are very superstitious, you must remember.  The land round the pool is swampy and at night you can sometimes see the lights dancing about.  I suppose some one saw them, and, finding no person there, immediately decided the pool was a gathering place for witches.”

“Pete says it’s the bodies of the men who have died of thirst on the plains searching for water,” declared Horace in an awed tone.

“That’s an ingenious explanation, but it is not the truth, my boy.  The lights are caused by certain gases that come from the marshy ground and glow when the atmosphere is in a certain condition.  Over in Scotland, on the peat bogs, they call them ‘friars’ lanterns.’”

“My, but I’d like to see one,” sighed Tom.

“Then I’m afraid you’ll be obliged to camp by the pool.  You might go there a hundred nights and never see a sign of one,” returned the ranchman.  And then, as the shadows cast by the mountains were reaching farther and farther out onto the prairie, he thought it best to turn the minds of the boys into other channels.