Billy Porter declaimed in a loud voice from the head of the procession.

“Of course, Kut-le has taken to the mountains.  He’ll steer clear of ranches and cowboys for a while.  Our chance lies in his giving up covering his trail after he gets well into the ranges.  We will get his trail and hang on till we can outwit him.  If he was alone, we’d never get him, barring accident.  But he will be a lot hampered by Miss Rhoda and I trust to her to hamper him a whole lot after she gets her hand in.”

All the rest of the burning afternoon they moved toward the mountains.  It was quite dusk when they entered the foothills.  The way, not good at best, grew difficult and dangerous to follow.  Billy led on, however, until darkness closed down on them in a little cactus-grown canon.  Here he halted and ordered camp for a few hours.

“Lord!” exclaimed DeWitt.  “You’re not going to camp!  I thought you were really going to do something!”

Billy finished lighting the fire and by its light he gave an impatient glance at the tenderfoot.  But the look of the burned, sand-grimed face, the bloodshot eyes, blazing with anxiety, caused him to speak patiently.

“Can’t kill the horses, DeWitt.  You must make up your mind that this is going to be a hard hunt.  You got to call out all the strength you’ve been storing up all your life, and then some.  We’ve got to use common sense.  Lord, I want to get ahead, don’t I!  I seen Miss Rhoda.  I know what she’s like.  This ain’t any joy ride for me, either.  I got a lot of feeling in it.”

John DeWitt extended his sun-blistered right hand and Billy Porter clasped it with his brown paw.

Jack Newman cleared his throat.

“Did you give your horse enough rope, John?  There is a good lot of grass close to the canon wall.  Quick as you finish your coffee, old man, roll in your blanket.  We will rest till midnight when the moon comes up, eh, Billy?”

DeWitt, finally convinced of the good sense and earnestness of his friends, obeyed.  The canon was still in darkness when Jack shook him into wakefulness but the mountain peak above was a glorious silver.  Camp was broken quickly and in a short time Billy was leading the way up the wretched trail.  DeWitt’s four hours of sleep had helped him.  He could, to some degree, control the feverish anxiety that was consuming him and he tried to turn his mind from picturing Rhoda’s agonies to castigating himself for leaving her unguarded even though Kut-le had left the ranch.  Before leaving the ranch that afternoon he had telegraphed and written Rhoda’s only living relative, her Aunt Mary.  He had been thankful as he wrote that Rhoda had no mother.  He had so liked the young Indian; there had been such good feeling between them that he could not yet believe that Porter’s surmise was wholly correct.

“Supposing,” he said aloud, “that you are wrong, Porter?  Supposing that she’s—­she’s dying of thirst down there in the desert?  You have no proof of Kut-le’s doing it.  It’s only founded on your Indian hate, you say yourself.”