SOME RATHER QUEER ROAD AGENTS

“You had better come back to the car, Miss Cullen,” remarked Lord Ralles, after a pause.

But she declined to do so, saying she wanted to know what I was going to telegraph; and he left us, for which I wasn’t sorry.  I told her of the good news I had to send, and she wanted to know if now we would try to catch the road agents.  I set her mind at rest on that score.  “I think they’ll give us very little trouble to bag,” I added, “for they are so green that it’s almost pitiful.”

“In not cutting the wires?” she asked.

“In everything,” I replied.  “But the worst botch is their waiting till we had just passed the Arizona line.  It they had held us up an hour earlier, it would only have been State’s prison.”

“And what will it be now?”

“Hanging.”

“What?” cried Miss Cullen.

“In New Mexico train-robbing is not capital, but in Arizona it is,” I told her.

“And if you catch them they’ll be hung?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“That seems very hard.”

The first signs of dawn were beginning to show by this time, and as the sky brightened I told Miss Cullen that I was going to look for the trail of the fugitives.  She said she would walk with me, if not in the way, and my assurance was very positive on that point.  And here I want to remark that it’s saying a good deal if a girl can be up all night in such excitement and still look fresh and pretty, and that she did.

I ordered the crew to look about, and then began a big circle around the train.  Finding nothing, I swung a bigger one.  That being equally unavailing, I did a larger third.  Not a trace of foot or hoof within a half-mile of the cars!  I had heard of blankets laid down to conceal a trail, of swathed feet, even of leathern horse-boots with cattle-hoofs on the bottom, but none of these could have been used for such a distance, let alone the entire absence of any signs of a place where the horses had been hobbled.  Returning to the train, the report of the men was the same.

“We’ve ghost road agents to deal with, Miss Cullen,” I laughed.  “They come from nowhere, bullets touch them not, their lead hurts nobody, they take nothing, and they disappear without touching the ground.”

“How curious it is!” she exclaimed.  “One would almost suppose it a dream,”

“Hold on,” I said.  “We do have something tangible, for if they disappeared they left their shells behind them.”  And I pointed to some cartridge-shells that lay on the ground beside the mail-car.  “My theory of aerial bullets won’t do.”

“The shells are as hollow as I feel,” laughed Miss Cullen.

“Your suggestion reminds me that I am desperately hungry,” I said.  “Suppose we go back and end the famine.”